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Pulmonary nitric oxide in mountain dwellers

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Populations living at high altitudes have an adaptive mechanism to offset hypoxia.

Abstract

Nitric oxide is synthesized in the lungs to help regulate blood flow, and its levels have been found to drop in species native to low altitudes, including humans, upon acute exposure to reduced oxygen concentration1,2,3. But we show here that exhalation of nitric oxide by chronically hypoxic populations of Tibetans living at 4,200 m and of Bolivian Aymara at 3,900 m is unexpectedly increased compared with a low-altitude reference sample from the United States. This consistent response in two far-removed, high-altitude locales indicates that increasing the concentration of nitric oxide in the lungs may represent a means of offsetting hypoxia.

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Figure 1

C. BEALL AND M. GOLDSTEIN

Figure 2: A Tibetan population living at 4,200 m, a Bolivian Aymara population at 3,900 m and a low-altitude population in the United States differ significantly in their mean concentrations of exhaled nitric oxide (NO; ANOVA, F = 77.9, d.f. = 2, P < 0.05); no sex or age differences are evident in the results.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Anthropology, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, 44106, Ohio, USA

    Cynthia M Beall

  2. Departments of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine, and Cancer Biology, Cleveland Clinic Foundation, Cleveland, 44195, Ohio, USA

    Daniel Laskowski & Serpil C. Erzurum

  3. Department of Medicine, Louis Stokes VA Medical Center, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, 44106, Ohio, USA

    Kingman P. Strohl

  4. Departamento Respiratorio, Instituto Boliviano de Biologia de Altura, La Paz, Bolivia

    Rudy Soria, Mercedes Villena, Enrique Vargas, Ana Maria Alarcon & Cristina Gonzales

Authors
  1. Cynthia M Beall
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  2. Daniel Laskowski
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  3. Kingman P. Strohl
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  4. Rudy Soria
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  5. Mercedes Villena
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  6. Enrique Vargas
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  7. Ana Maria Alarcon
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  8. Cristina Gonzales
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  9. Serpil C. Erzurum
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Correspondence to Cynthia M Beall.

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The authors declare no competing financial interests.

Supplementary information

Table 1. Healthy, non-smoking high-altitude native samples.

Bolivian Aymara, altitude 3900m

Tibetans, altitude 4200m

All values are mean ± SEM. The 13 males and 20 females in the low-altitude U.S. sample had average ages of 32 ± 2 and 31 ± 2 years, respectively. * p<0.05, 2-tailed t-test of Tibetan-Aymara differences in mean value of age-sex group.

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Beall, C., Laskowski, D., Strohl, K. et al. Pulmonary nitric oxide in mountain dwellers. Nature 414, 411–412 (2001). https://doi.org/10.1038/35106641

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