Water drinking during aerobic exercise improves the recovery of non-linear heart rate dynamics in coronary artery disease: crossover clinical trial

INTRODUCTION: The post-exercise recovery is a period of vulnerability of the cardiovascular system in which autonomic nervous system plays a key role in cardiovascular deceleration. It is already known that individuals with coronary artery disease (CAD) are at greater risk due to delayed vagal reactivation in this period. Water ingestion has been studied as a strategy to improve autonomic recovery and mitigate the risks during recovery. However, the results are preliminary and need further confirmation. Therefore, our aim was to investigate the influence of individualized water drinking on the non-linear dynamics of heart rate during and after aerobic exercise in CAD subjects. METHODS: 30 males with CAD were submitted to a control protocol composed of initial rest, warming up, treadmill exercise, and passive recovery (60 min). After 48 hours they performed the hydration protocol, composed of the same activities, however, with individualized water drinking proportional to the body mass lost in the control protocol. The non-linear dynamics of heart rate were assessed by indices of heart rate variability extracted from the recurrence plot, detrended fluctuation analysis, and symbolic analysis. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION: During exercise, the responses were physiological and similar in both protocols, indicating high sympathetic activity and reduced complexity. During recovery, the responses were also physiological, indicating the rise of parasympathetic activity and the return to a more complex state. However, during hydration protocol, the return to a more complex physiologic state occurred sooner and non-linear HRV indices returned to resting values between the 5th and 20th minutes of recovery. In contrast, during the control protocol, only a few indices returned to resting values within 60 minutes. Despite that, differences between protocols were not found. We conclude that the water drinking strategy accelerated the recovery of non-linear dynamics of heart rate in CAD subjects but did not influence responses during exercise. This is the first study to characterize the non-linear responses during and after exercise in CAD subjects.