Device-guided slow breathing reduces blood pressure and sympathetic activity in young normotensive individuals of both sexes
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Slow breathing (SLOWB) is recommended for use as an adjuvant treatment for hypertension. However, the extent to which blood pressure (BP) responses to SLOWB differ between men and women are not well-established. Therefore, we tested the hypothesis that an acute bout of SLOWB would induce larger decreases in BP in males than in females, given that males typically have higher resting BP. We also examined autonomic contributors to reduced BP during SLOWB; that is, muscle sympathetic nerve activity and spontaneous cardiovagal (sequence method) and vascular sympathetic baroreflex sensitivity. We tested normotensive females ( n = 10, age: 22 ± 2 y, body mass index: 22 ± 2 kg/m 2 ) and males ( n = 12, age: 23 ± 3 y, body mass index: 26 ± 4 kg/m 2 ). Subjects were tested at baseline and during the last 5 min of a 15-min RESPeRATE-guided SLOWB session. Overall, SLOWB reduced systolic BP by 3.2 ± 0.8 mmHg (main effect, P < 0.01). Females had lower systolic BP (main effect, P = 0.02); we observed no interaction between sex and SLOWB. SLOWB also reduced muscle sympathetic nerve activity burst incidence by −5.0 ± 1.4 bursts/100 heartbeats (main effect, P < 0.01). Although females tended to have lower burst incidence (main effect, P = 0.1), there was no interaction between sex and SLOWB. Cardiovagal baroreflex sensitivity improved during SLOWB (21.0 vs. 36.0 ms/mmHg, P = 0.03) with no effect of sex. Despite lower overall BP in females, our data support a lack of basement effect on SLOWB-induced reductions in BP, as SLOWB was equally effective in reducing BP in males and females. Our findings support the efficacy of the RESPeRATE device for reducing BP in both sexes, even in young, normotensive individuals. NEW & NOTEWORTHY We provide support for the effectiveness of device-guided slow breathing for blood pressure reduction in young normotensive women and men. Despite having lower baseline blood pressure and sympathetic nerve activity, women experienced equivalent reductions in both measures in response to RESPeRATE-guided slow breathing as men. Thus, slow breathing appears to be effective in young healthy normotensive individuals of both sexes and may be an ideal preventative therapy against future hypertension.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".