Dança e variabilidade da frequência cardíaca

Abstract

The dance is linked to the man's history from the beginning, when it was part of rituals or aided in communication. It can be considered one of the oldest forms of physical activity practiced by us, in several different modalities in a mixture of movement and rhythm. Dance medicine is now a growing area of science, but with many questions yet to be answered. For example, what are the cardiac autonomic responses to dance training? Searching all the literature on the subject dance and heart rate variability (HRV) a first study, a systematic review, was performed. This review has observed that the very restricted number of studies and their low quality methodological quality, makes any conclusion on the topic difficult. Going a little further, a second cross - sectional study was carried out comparing the HRV indices between a group of professional classical dancers and another group of non - regular physical activity women. The results did not indicate significant differences in the vagal or sympathetic modulation index between the groups. Classical ballet, an activity characterized as mixed and with intermittent efforts, does not seem to generate any stimulus able of change the autonomic cardiac response. New experimental studies with ballet have been suggested in order to clarify better how the autonomic modulation responds to this type of stimulus. Finally, in the development of a cross-sectional study, it was noticed that important care with the methodology of this design should be taken in favor of good quality in the findings. Therefore, a third and final study of this dissertation aims to construct a new scale that will help authors of cross-sectional studies, revisions with or without meta-analysis, that need to evaluate studies with this design. The Transversal Scale has only five questions, and is therefore a fast and appropriate tool to analyze the methodological quality of cross-sectional studies