Oxygen Saturation Behavior by Pulse Oximetry in Female Athletes: Breaking Myths.

Pilar Martín-Escudero,Mercedes Galindo-Canales,Manuel Fuentes-Ferrer,Ana María Cabanas

doi:10.3390/bios11100391

Pilar Martín-Escudero, Mercedes Galindo-Canales + Show 2 more

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https://doi.org/10.3390/bios11100391

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Abstract

The myths surrounding women’s participation in sport have been reflected in respiratory physiology. This study aims to demonstrate that continuous monitoring of blood oxygen saturation during a maximal exercise test in female athletes is highly correlated with the determination of the second ventilatory threshold () or anaerobic threshold (AnT). The measurements were performed using a pulse oximeter during a maximum effort test on a treadmill on a population of 27 healthy female athletes. A common behavior of the oxygen saturation evolution during the incremental exercise test characterized by a decrease in saturation before the aerobic threshold (AeT) followed by a second significant drop was observed. Decreases in peripheral oxygen saturation during physical exertion have been related to the athlete’s physical fitness condition. However, this drop should not be a limiting factor in women’s physical performance. We found statistically significant correlations between the maximum oxygen uptake and the appearance of the ventilatory thresholds ( and ), the desaturation time, the total test time, and between the desaturation time and the . We observed a relationship between the desaturation time and the appearance. Indeed, a linear regression model between the desaturation time and the appearance can predict of the values in our sample. Besides, we suggest that pulse oximetry is a simple, fairly accurate, and non-invasive technique for studying the physical condition of athletes who perform physical exertion.

Highlights

Nowadays, there has been a growing interest in studying factors affecting female physiological response to exercise, such as oxygen saturation variations [1,2,3,4,5]
This study aims to analyze the correlations between blood oxygen saturation variations and the ventilatory thresholds (VT1 or aerobic threshold (AeT) and VT2 or anaerobic threshold (AnT)) during a maximum stress test in female athletes with different skin pigmentation and different physical fitness condition
The results obtained from the stress test for the total population of 25 light-skinned and 2 dark-skinned healthy female athletes are shown in Tables 2 and 3

Summary

Introduction

There has been a growing interest in studying factors affecting female physiological response to exercise, such as oxygen saturation variations [1,2,3,4,5]. Throughout history, women have had to fight for their self-improvement in the sports world until they had the right to participate in specific sports and certain competitions like the Olympic Games [6]. The restriction was partly based on the idea that vigorous physical activity could impair women’s health and adversely affect their reproductive capacity. These myths still survive today in some countries and have limited women’s access to sports due to several factors such as social, political, religious, or biological [7,8,9,10,11,12]. Recent decades have witnessed a remarkable expansion of women’s sport, in long-duration activities [20,21,22,23,24,25], dispelling myths from other times based more on sociocultural attitudes than on scientific research data

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