Heart rate variability (HRV) is a simple, non-invasive, real-time analyzable, and highly reproducible measurement that captures incidences for assessing a person’s health and physical condition. Public security jobs are characterized by major exposure to risk factors known to influence the cardiovascular response to stimuli, e.g., night shifts, highly physically demanding activity, and acute stress activity. This study aimed to evaluate the HRV parameters in a population of 112 male personnel of the special forces and public order of the Carabinieri, aged 25–59, when engaged in several duty tasks, such as paratroopers, night shift police station officers, night shift patrol, dynamic precision shooting evaluative team, dynamic precision shooting non-evaluative team, and office clerks (used as control group). During the specific task of each participant, the HRV parameters were collected with wearable devices and processed. The HRV parameters in the time and frequency domains collected were average heart rate, standard deviation of all normal RR intervals, root mean square of successive differences in adjacent normal-to-normal (NN) intervals, very-low-frequency power, low-frequency power, high-frequency power, stress index, parasympathetic nervous system activity index, and sympathetic nervous system activity index. Parametric tests for independent series to compare the HRV parameters by subgroups within the study subjects were used. A multivariate linear regression analysis was conducted to evaluate the association between the HRV parameters and some personal and organizational factors. The comparison between different subgroups showed that activities with a high demand for concentration and precision, as is the case with paratroopers and dynamic precision shooters, differ significantly from activities that can be defined as routine, such as office work. Other activities, such as patrolling or remote management from operations centers, although including critical elements, did not deviate significantly from the control group. The study of HRV parameters is therefore a useful tool for occupational physicians, both for addressing work suitability assessments and for better targeting health promotion campaigns, to be considered as being aimed at monitoring the subject’s physiological parameters, and not at the diagnosis of any pathological condition, which should always be carried out by the medical specialist.
The problem of morbidity in deployed military personnel represents a much-debated topic. Because there have been two cases of thyroid cancer in the Tuscania regiment, the aim of the present study was to investigate the prevalence of all types of thyroid disease in a cohort of carabineers. A total of 673 carabineers, including 501 deployed carbineers (DCs) (29-48 years of age) and 172 nondeployed carabineers (NDCs) (29-51 years of age), of the Tuscania regiment were involved in the study. Thyroid volume, percentages of single nodules and multinodular goiter, percentage of autoimmune thyroid disease, and percentages and histological types of thyroid cancer were all measured. No statistical difference between DCs and NDCs was found for any of the data. Furthermore, when we divided DCs into subgroups according to time spent on deployment and time elapsed since the first deployment, we found no differences. However, a high prevalence of thyroid cancer was found in our cohort (2.0% in DCs and 2.5% in NDCs; not significant), and the prevalence of thyroid cancer in nodules in the cohort of carabineers was higher (10.0%) than the prevalence of thyroid cancer in nodules in the civilian population (5.6%, p < 0.001). No differences regarding the prevalence of thyroid diseases were observed when we compared DCs and NDCs, which suggests that no significant difference in exposure to toxic or carcinogenic substances that could have affected the thyroid occurred during deployments. The high prevalence of thyroid cancer in carabineers may merely reflect an increase of this cancer in the general population, or it may suggest the presence of some carcinogenic event in this specific cohort.
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