Newswise, February 13, 2016– Scientists at Wake Forest Baptist
Medical Center have found that a daily dose of beetroot juice significantly
improved exercise endurance and blood pressure in elderly patients with heart
failure with preserved ejection fraction (HFPEF).
The study is published in the current online edition of the Journal
of the American College of Cardiology-Heart Failure.
Exercise intolerance – shortness of breath and fatigue with
normal amounts of exertion -- is the primary symptom of HFPEF and is due partly
to non-cardiac factors that reduce oxygen delivery to active skeletal muscles.
HFPEF is a recently recognized disease that reflects how the
left ventricle of the heart pumps with each beat. It occurs primarily in older
women and is the dominant form of heart failure, as well as the most rapidly
increasing cardiovascular disorder in this country.
Emerging evidence suggests that dietary inorganic nitrate supplementation has beneficial effects on blood pressure control, vascular health, exercise capacity and oxygen metabolism.
The Wake Forest Baptist researchers enrolled 19 people in a
double-blinded, randomized safety study to determine which was better at
improving exercise intolerance, a single dose or a daily dose of the juice
given over multiple days.
The beetroot juice used is produced by a company in the United
Kingdom and is not commercially available in this country.
First, aerobic endurance and blood pressure were measured
after the participants received either a single dose of beetroot juice or a
placebo.
The researchers then administered a daily dose of beetroot
juice to all 19 patients for an average of seven days, and measured endurance
and blood pressure again. The juice dose in the study was equivalent to 2.4
ounces containing approximately 6 millimoles of inorganic nitrate.
The team found that the daily dosing of beetroot juice
improved aerobic endurance by 24 percent after one week, as compared to the
single dose which produced no improvement. Aerobic endurance was measured as
cycling time to exhaustion at a fixed workload lower than their maximum.
Another finding was that consumption of the juice
significantly reduced resting systolic blood pressure in both the single and
daily dose groups by 5 to 10 mmHg.
No adverse events were associated with either intervention.
“Although larger trials need to be conducted, these initial
findings suggest that one week of daily beetroot juice could be a potential
therapeutic option to improve aerobic endurance in patients with HFPEF, which
has implications for improving everyday activities and quality of life,” said
Dalane Kitzman, M.D., professor of internal medicine at Wake Forest Baptist and
senior author of the study.
This work was partially supported by NIH grants R01AG18915,
R01AG045551, P30AG021332, HL058091, The Kermit Glenn Phillips II Chair in
Cardiovascular
Medicine, Wake Forest School of Medicine, and the Moritz Chair in Geriatrics in the College of Nursing and Health Innovation at the University of Texas at Arlington. It was also partially supported by the Translational Science Center of the Reynolda Campus of Wake Forest University.
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