Gender differences in cardiovascular functions during exercise: a brief review

Exercise is a major challenge for the cardiovascular apparatus, since it has to provide adequate oxygen supply to exercising muscles and to guarantee arterial blood pressure regulation. Several adjustments, such as heart rate increase, contractility enhancement, and venous return modulation are made to accomplish this task. Furthermore, regular physical training induces several physiological adaptations due to an increase in parasympathetic and a decrease in sympathetic tone and to chronic increases in cardiac pre-load and after-load. There are gender-related physiological and morphological differences in the cardiovascular adjustments and adaptations to physical exercise in humans. In this review, we briefly summarize these differences. Moreover, differences in ECG pattern between sexes are discussed. © 2015, Springer-Verlag Italia.