>>USF Health study aims to prevent heat illness in athletes

Tampa, FL (June 29, 2006) -- With August fast approaching thousands of high school and college athletes in the Tampa Bay area will soon take to the practice field to prepare for the upcoming football season. Training outdoors in Florida's sweltering heat and high humidity can take a toll on even the most conditioned athletes.

Now, a study by doctors at USF Health seeks to arm coaches and athletic trainers with the information they need to prevent potentially life-threatening heat exhaustion and illness in athletes. The study, funded by a $15,000 grant from the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, uses a small electronic pill the size of a multivitamin to monitor the core body temperature of USF football players who volunteer as test subjects. The latest USF Health study builds upon a pilot study funded last year by the National Football League. Eric Coris, MD, director of the Division of Sports Medicine, Department of Family Medicine, is continuing to gather information from the pills to help identify the earliest signs of heat illness in the players and detect those at high risk for the condition.

"A major cause of death in athletics is heat illness," said Dr. Coris, a member of USF Health's Sports Medicine & Athletic Related Trauma Institute. "With this study, we are finding that we can monitor players' core temperature in a practical way to try to keep them out of trouble."

Dr. Eric Coris straps a data recorder to the back of USF Bulls linebacker Patrick St. Louis.

On a recent Friday afternoon, USF Bulls linebacker Patrick St. Louis runs on a treadmill in the USF College of Public Health's heat stress lab, while Dr. Coris checks his core temperature and heart rate every 20 seconds. Patrick's exercise regimen, which also includes leg lunges, push-ups and workouts with free weights, is coordinated by Marcus Kilpatrick, PhD, an exercise physiologist in the School of Physical Education. The tropical environment in the lab's heat chamber (86 degrees F and 80 percent humidity) is carefully controlled to replicate the climate experienced during a typical August-day practice on the football field.

Earlier that morning Patrick had swallowed the silicone-coated pill, which includes a crystal temperature sensor, battery and electronic transmitter. The pill travels to the intestines where the crystal vibrates in response to the temperature surrounding it and transmits a low-frequency magnetic signal picked up by an external data recorder strapped to the player's back.  The information is transmitted to a laptop computer outside the heat chamber for analysis. If the player's temperature gets too hot, an alarm goes off to alert Dr. Coris.

Following the training session in the heat chamber, the player fills out a symptom questionnaire. Dr. Coris and his colleagues have developed a heat illness symptom index to correlate core body temperature and other physiological indicators with heat stress-related symptoms such as fatigue, cramps, lightheadedness and chills. With further testing, he hopes to see the pill and symptom scale gain widespread use among athletic programs, thereby helping to prevent needless deaths from heat-related illness.

The researchers plan to evaluate more than 30 athletes in the heat chamber, using the electronic pills made by HQ Inc., a Palmetto, FL company that licenses the technology from Johns Hopkins University.

- USF Health -

USF Health is the University of South Florida's enterprise of researchers, teachers and clinicians dedicated to improving the full continuum of health. Its core is the colleges of Public Health, Nursing and Medicine, including a School of Physical Therapy, as well as the healthcare delivered by its 450 physicians and more than 100 nurse practitioners. In partnership with its affiliated hospitals, USF Health's research funding last year was $134 million -- more than half of which came from federal sources. Last year, USF health clinicians cared for more than 31,000 patients and oversaw 396,000 outpatient visits.