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Predicting Blood Pressure and Heart Rate Change With Cardiovascular Reactivity and Recovery: Results From 3-Year and 10-Year Follow Up

From the University of British Columbia, Department of Psychology, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.

Address correspondence and reprint requests to Wolfgang Linden, PhD, Psychology/UBC, 2136 West Mall, Vancouver BC V6T 1Z4 Canada. E-mail: wlinden{at}psych.ubc.ca

Objectives: We examined whether cardiovascular reactivity and recovery after laboratory-induced stress is useful in predicting 3-year and 10-year ambulatory blood pressure (BP) and heart rate (HR) among 330 initially normotensive individuals.

Methods: At baseline, BP and HR measurements were recorded during three 5-minute laboratory challenges and three 5-minute recovery periods after each challenge. Measurements of systolic BP, diastolic BP, and HR were collected throughout this baseline protocol and also at 3-year and 10-year follow up by ambulatory monitoring.

Results: After adjustment for traditional biologic predictors, reactivity was found to explain significant variance in follow-up data across all 3-year indices and two of the 10-year indices. Recovery, entered in a following step after reactivity, was found to explain additional significant variance across all 3-year indices but none of the 10-year indices. Family hypertension history data were not found to be significantly associated with reactivity or recovery nor were they predictive of longitudinal ambulatory data after adjustment for initial resting cardiovascular levels.

Conclusion: Overall, from a hierarchical regression model perspective, the data support the use of both reactivity and recovery in clinical predictions of proximal BP and HR and generally support the use of reactivity (but not recovery) in long-term BP predictions.

Key Words: reactivity • recovery • hypertension • blood pressure • ambulatory monitoring • family history

Abbreviations: BP = blood pressure; HR = heart rate; SBP = systolic blood pressure; DBP = diastolic blood pressure; CVD = cardiovascular disease.

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