Exercise Capacity and Perceived Exertion on Treadmill Stress Test Performed While Wearing vs Without a Surgical Mask: A Randomized Clinical Trial in Healthy Adults
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background The graded exercise treadmill stress test (GXT) is among the most frequently performed tests in cardiology. The COVID-19 pandemic led many healthcare facilities to require patients to wear a mask during the test. This study evaluated the effect of wearing a surgical face mask on exercise capacity and perceived exertion. Methods In this prospective, randomized crossover trial, 35 healthy adults performed a GXT using the Bruce protocol while wearing a surgical mask, and without a mask. The primary outcome was exercise capacity in metabolic equivalents (MET), and the secondary outcome was exercise perception on the modified Borg scale (from 0 to 10). Effort duration, heart rate, oxygen saturation, and blood pressure were also analyzed. Results Exercise capacity was reduced by 0.4 MET (95% confidence interval [CI] –0.7 to –0.2) during the GXT with a mask (11.8 ± 2.7 vs 12.3 ± 2.5 MET, P = 0.001), and the final perceived effort increased by 0.5 points (95% CI 0.2 to 0.8; 8.4 ± 1.3 vs 7.9 ± 1.6, P = 0.004). Effort duration was cut down by 24 seconds (CI –0:39 to –0:09; 10:03 ± 2:30 vs 10:27 ± 2:16 [minutes:seconds], P = 0.003). Oxygen saturation was slightly lower at the end of the test when participants wore a mask. No significant differences occurred in heart rate or blood pressure during the test. Conclusion Wearing a surgical mask causes a statistically significant decrease in exercise capacity and increase in perceived exertion. This small effect is not clinically significant for the interpretation of test results.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 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 | 0.001 |
| 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".