PURPOSE Assess exertional heat illness (EHI) history and preparedness in athletes competing in a World Athletics Championships under hot/humid conditions and identify the factors associated with preparedness strategies. METHODS Of the 207 registered national teams invited to participate in the study, 50 (24%) accepted. The 957 athletes (49% of all 1965 registered) in these teams were invited ...

OBJECTIVE: To examine the effects of creatine supplementation on the incidence of cramping and injury observed during 1 season of National Collegiate Athletic Association Division IA football training and competition. DESIGN AND SETTING: In an open-label manner, subjects who volunteered to take creatine ingested 0.3 g.kg(-1).d(-1) of creatine for 5 days followed by an average of 0.03 g.kg.(-1)d...

Athletes with spinal cord injury (SCI), and in particular tetraplegia, have an increased risk of heat strain and consequently heat illness relative to able-bodied individuals. Strategies that reduce the heat strain during exercise in a hot environment may reduce the risk of heat illness. To test the hypotheses that precooling or cooling during intermittent sprint exercise in a heated environmen...

BACKGROUND Fatalities in football are rare but tragic events. PURPOSE The purpose was to describe the causes of fatalities in high school and college football players and potentially provide preventive strategies. STUDY DESIGN Descriptive epidemiology study. METHODS We reviewed the 243 football fatalities reported to the National Center for Catastrophic Sports Injury Research from July 19...

An outbreak of gastrointestinal illness with clinical and epidemiologic features of enterotoxigenic Escherichia coli (ETEC) occurred among patrons of a restaurant during April 1991. Illnesses among several groups of patrons were characterized by diarrhea (100%) and cramps (79%-88%) lasting a median of 3-5 days. Median incubation periods ranged from 50 to 56 h. A nonmotile strain of E. coli (E. ...

In the heat, a positive body heat storage and the associated increase in core body temperature elicit the reflex physiological thermoregulatory mechanisms of sweating and cutaneous vasodilation in order to enhance heat dissipation. However under circumstances where these mechanisms cannot facilitate a sufficiently high rate of heat loss, core body temperature continually rises, and if left unch...

Pathophysiology of aggravation and death due to heat illness includes high fever, circulatory failure and systemic inflammatory response syndrome (SIRS), as well as disseminated intravascular coagulation (DIC) and multiple organ failure. DIC and multiple organ failure are the important determinants of severity and mortality of heat

The impact of heat on mortality is well documented but deaths tend to occur after (or lag) extreme heat events, and mortality data is generally not available for timely surveillance during extreme heat events. Recently, systems for near-real time surveillance of heat illness have been reported but have not been validated as predictors of non-external cause of deaths associated with extreme heat...