Nathan Bryan, PhD explains why nitric oxide matters in human health and why most people have never heard of it. He discusses a new non-invasive way to measure nitric oxide levels in the body, a molecule critical to cardiovascular function and overall wellness.
One of the things we've been trying to do as we move the field forward is to bring awareness about nitric oxide, because we in the biomedical science arena are really excited about it. We've known about it for 20 plus years. But if you go out on the streets and ask the lay people, what is nitric oxide, I'm guessing probably 75, 80% of people don't know what it is, or they confuse it with nitrous oxide, the anesthetic they get when they go to the dentist. So we realize that there's a huge educational hurdle to overcome, our first approach in doing this. And you can't go to your physician and ask for a lab to determine your nitric oxide levels like you can for vitamin D, or get a reading for your cholesterol or magnesium or any other blood labs that are standard measurements. So knowing that, we've been doing correlation studies for a number of years and trying to get a sense on a way that we can non invasively determine a person's nitric oxide status. And so as you mentioned, there's an enterocalivary circulation or recirculation of nitrate nitrite that creates what we call a human nitrogen cycle. So for instance, about 25% of the nitrate that's produced within your body, and also what you take in through eating certain foods, for instance, green leafy vegetables, about 25% of this is absorbed in the proximal gut, and then that's concentrated in your salivary glands. So there's an enterosalivary circulation. So each time you salivate, then you get a burst of nitrate in your mouth. And then the faculty of anaerobic bacteria that reside on your teeth and the crypts of your tongue then have a functional nitrate reductase. Then this nitrate reductase produces nitrite level, salivary nitrite level, sitter, anywhere from 100 to 1,000 times higher than the concentration that's found in your plasma. Then each time you swallow, you get a burst of nitric oxide, because the PKA of nitrite is about 3.2. So in the acid environment of the stomach, each time you swallow, provided you have sufficient enterosalivary circulation, we get a burst of nitric oxide in the stomach. This pathway has been shown to enhance gastric mucosal blood flow, increase absorption of nutrients, prevent overgrowth of foodborne toxin or bacteria, including H. Pylori. And so really an essential pathway for modulating nitric oxide homeostasis. And so what we realized then was we could capture this through a color metric, non invasive diagnostic. So we've developed really the first and only nitric oxide diagnostic through the University of Texas Health Science Center, Houston.
