In our study, 26 volunteers had to be excluded due
to echocardiographic abnormalities, even after passing
exclusion criteria based on an extensive interview and
clinical examinations. Additionally, 65 volunteers revealed
electrocardiographic abnormalities. Applying all exclusion
criteria the complete study population of 1708
volunteers finally compromised 853 individuals. This
underlines the importance of highly standardised preselective
measures to describe an apparently healthy population. In comparison to our study previously published
reference equations for blood pressure and heart
rate used only clinical and/or ECG parameters to exclude
diseased subjects [9–12,24]. It may be assumed that differences
in the pre-exercise diagnostics will lead to
differences in results.