Isopropyl Nitrite Induced Hemoglobin Oxidation in Diabetics Blood

Abstract

The effect of isopropyl nitrite on human Type 2 Diabetes blood was undertaken using non diabetics blood as the control group. The differences in patient characteristics such as the mean ages and weights of the two groups were not statistically significant (P>0.05), and the ratios of non-smokers to smokers were similar meaning that the two groups were well matched. These studies revealed that diabetics erythrocytes with a mean HbA1C value ± SEM of 11.4 ± 0.27% were oxidized at a significantly greater rate than that of the control blood (P<0.05). The isopropyl nitrite mean oxidation time ± SEM of diabetics blood was 1.5 ± 0.05 min (n = 20). For the nondiabetics blood a mean HbA1C ± SEM value of 5.5 ± 0.08% was obtained with a mean oxidation time ± SEM of the non-diabetics blood of 4.6 ± 0.13 min (n=20). These studies demonstrate that Diabetes blood has an enhanced susceptibility of oxidation into methemoglobin by isopropyl nitrite compared to its respective control group, i.e., the normal blood. This finding could be attributed to the fact that isopropyl nitrite is a nitrite ester which contains a saturated three hydrocarbon chain similar to other analogous nitrite esters (ethyl nitrite, butyl nitrite, pentyl nitrite and hexyl nitrite) which also contain saturated hydrocarbon chains that previously showed a statistically significant increased oxidation time for diabetics blood (P<0.05) [1-6]. Thus this study confirms that the difference in the number of methylene molecules has no impact on the rate of oxidation on either diabetics blood or nondiabetics blood (P>0.05). These findings also imply that the increased susceptibility to isopropyl nitrite induced oxidation reaction in diabetics blood is a direct function of the amount of HbA1C present in the blood, i.e., a clear inverse relation appears to exist between the amount of HbA1C present and the oxidation time