Review
Copyright ©The Author(s) 2016. Published by Baishideng Publishing Group Inc. All rights reserved.
World J Cardiol. Mar 26, 2016; 8(3): 258-266
Published online Mar 26, 2016. doi: 10.4330/wjc.v8.i3.258
Exercise oscillatory ventilation: Mechanisms and prognostic significance
Bishnu P Dhakal, Gregory D Lewis
Bishnu P Dhakal, Cardiology Division, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA 02114, United States
Gregory D Lewis, Heart Failure and Cardiac Transplantation Unit, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, MA 02114, United States
Author contributions: Dhakal BP and Lewis GD made substantial contributions to concept and design of the paper, drafted the article, made critical revisions related to important intellectual content of the manuscript and did final approval of the version of the article to be published.
Conflict-of-interest statement: Authors declare no conflict of interest for this article.
Open-Access: This article is an open-access article which was selected by an in-house editor and fully peer-reviewed by external reviewers. It is distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
Correspondence to: Gregory D Lewis, MD, Heart Failure and Cardiac Transplantation Unit, Massachusetts General Hospital, Bigelow 800, 55 Fruit Street, Boston, MA 02114, United States. glewis@partners.org
Telephone: +1-617-7269554 Fax: +1-617-7264105
Received: June 2, 2015
Peer-review started: June 6, 2015
First decision: August 16, 2015
Revised: November 22, 2015
Accepted: December 17, 2015
Article in press: December 18, 2015
Published online: March 26, 2016
Core Tip

Core tip: Alteration in breathing patterns in patients with advanced heart failure (HF) characterized by cyclic variation of ventilation with a period of approximately one minute is known as periodic breathing. Periodic breathing during exercise, known as exercise oscillatory ventilation (EOV), is an oscillatory ventilatory pattern during exercise that persists for at least 60% of the exercise test with an amplitude ≥ 15% of the average resting value. Circulatory delay, pulmonary congestion and chemoreceptor sensitivity has been proposed to cause generation of EOV. EOV is found to be an independent predictor of worse outcome irrespective of other gas exchange variables in HF patients.