Effects of Three Recumbent Postures on Autonomic Nervous System in Patients with Coronary Artery Disease

Because patients with coronary artery disease (CAD) have depressed vagal modulation and the mortality risk from acute myocardial infarction is lower in patients with higher vagal modulation, methods that can increase vagal modulation are desirable in patients with CAD. We intended to inspect the effect of recumbent posture on vagal modulation. By using angiography, 33 patients with abnormal (CAD group) and 33 patients with normal coronary arteries (control group) were studied. The nonlinear as well as the linear characteristics of heart rate variability (HRV) were analyzed on these patients in three recumbent postures: namely, the supine, right lateral decubitus, and left lateral decubitus postures. The lower the normalized high-frequency power (nHF) in the supine or left lateral decubitus posture, the higher the increase in the nHF when the posture was changed from supine or left lateral decubitus to right lateral decubitus in both groups of patients. Right lateral decubitus posture can lead to the highest vagal modulation and the lowest sympathetic modulation among the three recumbent postures in both normal and patients with CAD. Therefore, the right lateral decubitus posture can be used as an effective physiologic vagal enhancer in patients with CAD.