Impact of wearing a surgical and cloth mask during cycle exercise

Abstract

We sought to determine the impact of wearing cloth or surgical masks on the cardiopulmonary responses to moderate-intensity exercise. Twelve subjects (n=5 females) completed three, 8-min cycling trials while breathing through a: non-rebreathing valve (laboratory control), cloth, or surgical mask. Heart rate (HR), oxyhemoglobin saturation (SpO2), breathing frequency (Fb), mouth pressure, partial pressure of end-tidal carbon dioxide (PetCO2) and oxygen (PetO2), dyspnea, were measured throughout exercise. A subset of n=6 subjects completed an additional exercise bout without a mask (ecological control). There were no differences in Fb, HR or SpO2 across conditions (all p>0.05). Compared to the laboratory control (0.9±0.7cmH2O[mean±SD]), mouth pressure swings were greater with the surgical mask (4.7±0.9; p<0.0001), but similar with the cloth mask (3.6±4.8cmH2O; p=0.66). Wearing a cloth mask decreased PetO2 (-3.5±3.7mmHg) and increased PetCO2 (+2.0±1.3mmHg) relative to the ecological control (both p<0.05). There were no differences in end-tidal gases between mask conditions and laboratory control (both p>0.05). Dyspnea was similar between the control conditions and the surgical mask (p>0.05) but was greater with the cloth mask compared to laboratory (+0.9±1.2) and ecological (+1.5±1.3) control conditions (both p<0.05). Wearing a mask during short-term moderate-intensity exercise may increase dyspnea but has minimal impact on the cardiopulmonary response.
 Novelty bullets:
 • Wearing surgical or cloth masks during exercise has no impact on breathing frequency, tidal volume, oxygenation, heart rate
 • However, there are some changes in inspired and expired gas fractions that are physiologically irrelevant.
 • In young healthy individuals, wearing surgical or cloth masks during submaximal exercise has few physiological consequences. 

The Effect of Surgical Mask Use in Anaerobic Running Performance

“…This lower blood oxygen saturation would be expected due to increased partial pressure of CO 2 at high exercise intensity, increased tidal volume, and an inadequate oxygen and carbon dioxide exchange due re-breathing enriching inhaled air with CO 2 [8]. Contrary to our results, authors did not find a blood oxygen saturation decrease with surgical masks, either during extenuated [33], vigorous [11] or steady exercise [34]. However, a key factor explaining the differences lies in the intensity and level of previous training.…”

Effect of Wearing Surgical Face Masks During Exercise: Does Intensity Matter?

“…They found that HR, respiratory rate, blood pressure, and time to exhaustion did not differ between groups. Doherty et al (2021) examined the impact of wearing cloth or surgical masks on the cardiopulmonary responses in 12 healthy young individuals during an 8-min moderate-intensity cycling exercise. It was found that wearing surgical or cloth masks during exercise had no impact on breathing frequency, tidal volume, oxygenation, and heart rate.…”

“…Since the outbreak of COVID-19, several primary studies (Fikenzer et al, 2020;Lassing et al, 2020;Shaw et al, 2020;Doherty et al, 2021;Driver et al, 2021;Epstein et al, 2021) have been conducted and attempted to evaluate the impact of face masks on human physiological and perceptual responses during exercise. While some studies revealed that wearing face mask would pose negative impact on performance and physiological variables (Fikenzer et al, 2020;Lassing et al, 2020;Driver et al, 2021), others demonstrated contrasting results (Shaw et al, 2020;Doherty et al, 2021;Epstein et al, 2021). These disparate findings between studies might be attributed to the notable methodological differences in relevant literature.…”

Possible toxicity of chronic carbon dioxide exposure associated with mask use, particularly in pregnant women, children and adolescents -a scoping review

“…In total, significant changes (p<0.05) could be found in most of the evaluated studies that measured body CO 2 content during mask use [18,[29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38][39][40][41][42][43][44] (Table 2). Experiments with relatively short evaluation times [45] or questionable study design [46,47] showed no effects caused by masks. However, some well conducted studies also found no statistical difference between mask and no mask use, though measured CO 2 levels were continuously higher in mask wearers [25,48].…”