Valsalva Maneuver

Excerpt

Antonio Maria Valsalva, an Italian physician, first described the Valsalva maneuver (VM) in his work De Aure Humana Tractatus in 1704. Antonio Valsalva only described this maneuver to insufflate the middle ear cavity. In 1850, Eduard Friedrich and Ernst Heinrich Weber reported a Valsalva-induced blackout. The maneuver has been used in multiple clinical domains ranging from the evaluation of autonomic dysfunction to the treatment of arrhythmias and a marker for heart failure.

Valsalva maneuver is the performance of forced expiration against a closed glottis. Many activities of our daily lives, such as straining during defecation or playing the saxophone entail the performance of the Valsalva maneuver. The key event occurring during the maneuver is increasing intrathoracic pressure leading to the reduction of preload to the heart. The reflex cardiovascular changes during and after the maneuver are because of reduced preload engaging baroreflex and other compensatory reflex mechanisms.