TDK conference 2014

Heart rate variability assessment is proved to be a new and developing field in human and veterinary medicine according to numerous international publications but this topic is relatively new in Hungarian equine research. It has been concluded that HRV analysis is a useful method to examine fetal well-being in pregnant mares in utero.

Our goal was to compare HRV time-domain values and to determine some basic data in pregnant (Day 121-330) and non-pregnant mares with telemetric electrocardiography. Fifteen pregnant and nine non-pregnant, asymptomatic mares have been evaluated with similar breed, sex, age, and under the same housing and feeding conditions. Significant (P < 0,05) differences could be detected in HRV parameters (mean heart rate, RR-intervals, standard deviation of normal-normal intervals and root mean square of successive differences) between the 28 (pregnant) and 20 (non-pregnant) ECG recordings.

According to our results we can suspect that the excessive growth of the foal fetus increases load to the dam’s cardiovascular system in the terminal stage of gestation and thus, affects the maternal HRV as well.