Acute Dietary Nitrate Supplementation Decreases Systolic Blood Pressure and Increases Dry Static Apnea Performance in Females

Collofello BS, Moskalik B, Essick EE. Acute Dietary Nitrate Supplementation Decreases Systolic Blood Pressure and Increases Dry Static Apnea Performance in Females. JEPonline 2014;17(4):1526. Recently, dietary inorganic nitrate has been explored as a sports nutrition supplement, and has been shown to enhance exercise performance by reducing metabolic oxygen cost and lowering blood pressure. The aim of this research was to study the effects of nitrate supplementation on cardiovascular function and duration of dry static apnea in 12 healthy females. The subjects were assigned to receive 70 ml of organic beetroot juice (BR; containing ~5.0 mmol of nitrate) and a nitrate-depleted beetroot juice placebo (PLC; ~0.003 mmol of nitrate) in a randomized, double blind, crossover design. After 2.5 hrs post-ingestion of the supplement, the subjects performed three 20-sec submaximal static apneas separated by 90 sec of rest, followed by a maximal effort apnea. The duration of maximum dry static apnea, resting systolic pressure (SP), resting heart rate (HR) were statistically analyzed. The BR supplementation significantly decreased resting SP compared to the nitrate PLC conditions (x̄ = -4.82%, SD ± 4.06, Binomial test0.50 P=0.039). Although a trend was noted for an increase in the BR maximal apnea duration (52.6 sec) versus the PLC (48.7 sec), the difference was not statistically significant (Binomial test0.50 P=0.098). These results indicate that acute dietary nitrate decreases resting SP, but does not increase maximum static apnea in young healthy females. These findings may be advantageous for hypoxia associated athletic activities such as swimming and exercising at high altitude.