Walk in to any health food store, and you’ll see new products claiming to contain nitric oxide.
“They don’t,” said Jack R. Lancaster, professor of anesthesiology at UAB. “Nitric oxide is a toxic gas.”
The recent interest in nitric oxide stems from a 1987 discovery that the body naturally produces a harmless amount of the substance, which is essential to a number of bodily functions. For example, nitric oxide is essential to controlling the delivery of oxygen to by blood to the tissues, Lancaster said.
While these health store products do not contain nitric oxide, they do contain arginine — the substance from which nitric oxide is naturally produced. Past studies have suggested that administration of arginine can induce nitric oxide production and vessel relaxation.
However, in a paper published in the May 28 edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a team of researchers, including Lancaster, recently found that the arginine effect is not due to the arginine acting as the source of nitric oxide, but instead as a stimulator to the outside of the cell that sends a message into the cell to increase the nitric oxide formation. These findings raise the possibility of scientists designing a substance even more effective than arginine, and thus greatly improving the health benefits.
Other authors on this paper include: Mantesh S. Joshi and T. Bruce Ferguson, Jr., Department of Surgery, Louisiana State University; Fruzsina K. Johnson and Robert A. Johnson, Department of Physiology, Tulane University; and Sampath Parthasarathy, Department of Pathology at Louisiana State University.
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