Children’s Cardiovascular Reactivity: Racial Differences in Cardiac Index and Systemic Resistance Responses to Exercise

Maximal cycle ergometer stress testing in a biracial population of healthy children in Augusta, Georgia has shown exercise-induced blood pressure (BP) differences between the black children and the white children [1]. At rest, there were no BP differences between races but at maximal exercise, the black subjects had higher BP values than their white counterparts. The object of this investigation was to determine whether the difference could be explained by high cardiac index (CI in liters/min/m2) or by high systemic vascular resistance (SVR, in Wood units).