Enhanced left ventricular diastolic filling associated with long-term endurance training.

Normal aging is associated with an impairment in early left ventricular diastolic filling. To test the hypothesis that long-term endurance exercise training is associated with enhanced ventricular diastolic filling indices, we compared transmitral pulsed Doppler inflow spectra in healthy young adults; healthy elderly, sedentary subjects (sedentary old); and healthy elderly, endurance athletes (master athletes). Our data demonstrate that, despite an increase in left ventricular mass, early diastolic filling was enhanced in master athletes compared to the sedentary old. Blood pressure of both master athletes and the sedentary olds was greater than the young adults, but the higher blood pressure did not correlate to changes in filling parameters. Resting systolic function and heart rate were not significantly different in all three different groups. Early left ventricular filling indices in master athletes more closely resemble transmitral inflow patterns of healthy young adults. Long-term endurance exercise is associated with physiologic hypertrophy and ventricular filling dynamics more characteristic of the young than the old.