SEX-DIFFERENCES IN HUMAN CARDIOVASCULAR-RESPONSES TO EXTERNAL EXCITATION

The purpose of this study was to investigate the sex particularities in human cardiovascular responses to different external influences using the traditional physiological approach and non-traditional methods of dynamical systems theory. Measurements were taken in 21 healthy women and 15 men exposed to noise stress, passive coping, and in 35 women and 25 men exposed to double mental arithmetic stress, active coping. Results showed that, firstly, cardiovascular reactivity in men and women was determined by the type of stress. Thus, in a majority of humans heart rate did not change during noise but increased during mental stress, blood pressure decreased during noise but increased during mental. stress. Secondly, results demonstrated the significant sex differences in the basal and stress cardiovascular activity. So, the women showing the greater basal and stress heart rate displayed the hypotensive responses to passive coping more often and the hypertensive responses to active coping less often than men. Thirdly, the changes in normalized entropy of the electrocardiogram signal, reflecting the changes in heart physiological variability, also depended on the sex of subjects and the nature of stress. During noise normalized entropy increased in a majority of women but decreased in a majority of men. Mental stress caused both decreases and increases in normalized entropy in men and women. But the increases in normalized entropy during stress and especially during recovery were greater in women than in men. Normalized entropy was demonstrated to be a more sensitive marker of sex and individual differences in cardiovascular responses to stress than heart rate and blood pressure. Results suggest that the lower blood pressure reactions and the greater increases in normalized entropy, ie. in physiological heart variability, may partly result in higher cardiovascular stress resistance in women relative to men.