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BRIEF RESEARCH REPORT article

Front. Sports Act. Living
Sec. Exercise Physiology
Volume 6 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/fspor.2024.1356577
This article is part of the Research Topic Women's Cycling: Specificities, Situation and Perspectives View all 4 articles

Cardiac function and autonomic cardiac function during a multistage cycling event: a brief report

Provisionally accepted
Vincent Menard Vincent Menard 1,2*Anna Barrero Anna Barrero 2Thibault Lachard Thibault Lachard 3,4Lucien Robinault Lucien Robinault 5Lingxia Li Lingxia Li 1,2Frédéric Schnell Frédéric Schnell 3,6François Carré François Carré 3,6Solene Le Douairon Lahaye Solene Le Douairon Lahaye 1,2
  • 1 University of Rennes 2 – Upper Brittany, Rennes, France
  • 2 Laboratoire des Sciences du Mouvement, du Sport et de la Santé (M2S), Bruz, France
  • 3 University of Rennes 1, Rennes, France
  • 4 Service de Médecine du Sport et Explorations fonctionnelles, Centre Hospitalier Universitaire de Clermont-Ferrand, Clermont-Ferrand, Auvergne, France
  • 5 Université Polytechnique Hauts-de-France, Valenciennes, Nord-Pas-de-Calais, France
  • 6 Service de Medicine du Sport, Centre Hospitalier Universitaire (CHU) de Rennes, Rennes, France

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    Prolonged and repeated exercise performed during ultra-endurance event can induce general and cardiac fatigue known as exercise-induced cardiac fatigue (EICF). Our objective was to find a possible correlation between the cardiac function and the autonomic cardiac function. During a multistage ultra-endurance event, a female well-trained cyclist underwent daily rest echocardiography and HRV measurements to assessed cardiac function and cardiac autonomic function. Athlete completed 3345km at 65% of her maximum heart rate and 39% of her maximum aerobic power. A progressive improvement of the systolic function for both the left ventricle and right ventricle was observed during the event. Alterations were observed on cardiac autonomic function with an imbalance between sympathetic and parasympathetic but there is no sign of significant correlation between the cardiac function and the autonomic cardiac function and no signs of cardiac fatigue either. Further analysis should be performed on a larger sample to confirm these results.

    Keywords: Endurance, exercice-induced fatigue, Heart rate variability, Echocardiography, Athlete

    Received: 19 Dec 2023; Accepted: 16 Jul 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Menard, Barrero, Lachard, Robinault, Li, Schnell, Carré and Le Douairon Lahaye. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Vincent Menard, University of Rennes 2 – Upper Brittany, Rennes, France

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