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Attenuated cardiovascular reactivity is related to higher anxiety and fatigue symptoms in truck drivers

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Depression and anxiety have been linked with reduced stress-induced cardiovascular reactivity (CVR), which could be indicative of autonomic dysregulation. Less is known about the association between work-related fatigue and CVR. Truck drivers experience high levels of depression, anxiety, and fatigue, with repeated psychophysiological stressors on the road, yet little is known about the effects of these conditions on their CVR. 386 truck drivers completed the Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale (HADS) and the Occupational Fatigue Exhaustion/Recovery Scale (OFER-15). Systolic (SBP) and diastolic (DBP) blood pressure, and heart rate (HR) were measured at rest and during a stressor protocol to measure CVR. Multivariate regression analyses were used to determine relationships between variables and adjusted for nine key covariates. Higher symptoms of persistent fatigue were related to a reduced SBP reactivity (β = -0.237, p = .008) and reduced DBP reactivity (β = -0.256, p = .005), whilst there was a positive trend between acute fatigue and DBP reactivity (β = 0.168, p = .053). Higher symptoms of anxiety were related to a reduced SBP reactivity (β = -0.167, p = .011). This study demonstrated in a population of truck drivers, both anxiety and persistent fatigue were related to an attenuated SBP reactivity in a combined model, whereas there was a positive trend between acute fatigue solely and DBP reactivity. These novel findings may have serious implications for cardiovascular disease risk in truck drivers, and future research should attempt to establish the causal effect of these associations and the underlying physiological mechanisms.

Funding

Public Health Research Programme. Grant Number: NIHR PHR 15/190/42

Colt Foundation (reference: JD/618).

History

School

  • Sport, Exercise and Health Sciences

Published in

Psychophysiology

Volume

58

Issue

9

Publisher

Wiley

Version

  • VoR (Version of Record)

Rights holder

© The Authors

Publisher statement

This is an Open Access Article. It is published by Wiley under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Licence (CC BY 4.0). Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Acceptance date

2021-05-11

Publication date

2021-06-04

Copyright date

2021

ISSN

0048-5772

eISSN

1469-8986

Language

  • en

Depositor

Dr Nicola Paine. Deposit date: 12 May 2021

Article number

e13872

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