Comparison of the Time-Course and Magnitude of Cardiorespiratory Responses to Superimposed Surgical Masks or N95 Respirators during 20-min Treadmill Walking
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Wearing medical barriers has recently expanded from healthcare to public settings, and could increase dead space and facilitate rebreathing of expired air resulting in heat accumulation, hypercapnia, and hypoxia, particularly during physical activity. We recently showed that participants wearing surgical masks (SM) and N95 respirators (N95) over 60-min during seated rest had mild and immediately reversible (a) increases face microclimate temperature, (b) increases in the pressure of end-tidal (P ET )CO 2 , (c) decreases in P ET O 2 , but (d) no differences in peripheral oxygen saturation (SpO 2 ). Previous publications showed conflicting results of superimposed barrier wearing during physical activity, and there are limited studies that assessed face microclimate temperature and end-tidal gases, particularly comparing superimposed SM and N95. We hypothesized that participants wearing SM and N95 will experience mild face microclimate hyperthermia, hypoxia, and hypercapnia during 3mph treadmill walking. Participants (n=18; 8F) randomly wore (a) no barrier (NB), (b) SM or (c) N95 during a 10-min standing baseline, 20-min treadmill walking (3 mph), and a 10-min standing recovery. We continuously measured face microclimate temperature (thermistor), end tidal gases (P ET CO 2 , P ET O 2 ; oro-nasal cannula), SpO 2 (peripheral pulse oximeter). Average 20-min P ET CO 2 (higher; p<0.0001, P=0.0001) and P ET O 2 (lower; P=0.0003, P=0.0178) were significantly from baseline for both SM and N95, respectively. The delta between the 20-min average compared to the baseline data was not statistically significant for P ET CO 2 or P ET O 2 in all three conditions, except for ΔP ET CO 2 NB vs. N95 (higher; P=0.0344). Additionally, there was no difference in SpO 2 across all barrier conditions during exercise. These mild physiological effects may account for qualitative reports of shortness of breath and increased perceived exertion while wearing barriers during physical activity. However, these effect-magnitudes are not physiologically-meaningful, and are immediately reversed upon cessation of exercise and/or barrier removal. NSERC. This is the full abstract presented at the American Physiology Summit 2024 meeting and is only available in HTML format. There are no additional versions or additional content available for this abstract. Physiology was not involved in the peer review process.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.000 | 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".