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A pilot study in Springfield will utilize runners in the Bass Pro Shops Marathon this weekend—and they’ll have to do something a little unusual to take part. KSMU’s Michele Skalicky has more…

Saturday night, sometime after 10, some of the runners in the Bass Pro Shops marathon Sunday will fill up a glass of water and swallow what looks like a multi-vitamin, only it isn’t. It’s actually an ingestible core body temperature sensor called CorTemp.
The device will allow St. John’s Medical Research Institute to look at the runners’ core temperature during the race…

"It's basically the size of a large vitamin, and you swallow it.  It runs thru the digestive tract and, after about four or five hours, is in a position in the digestive tract where we can continuously measure temperature and heart rate throughout the duration."

Dr. Roger Huckfeldt is medical director for St. John’s Medical Research. And, in case you were wondering…

"The pill then passes naturally anywhere from one day to five or six days."

During the race, data from the CorTemp devices will be transmitted to researchers via radio frequencies…

"We'll have a monitor, more than one monitor scattered at different points on the race course, and they will simply run up to us at the race course or we'll run alongside of them, and it takes about ten or 15 seconds for it to register and it records it in a database for us."

According to Dr. Huckfeldt, with intense exercise, there are time periods where even healthy runners can suffer heat exhaustion at times when it’s not expected. He says they hope to learn what happens to core body temperature during a race…

"Does it spike?  Does it peak and then stay there and where does that happen?"

Dr. Huckfeldt says elevated core temperatures affect all of the organs in the body...

"It affects how each organ works, how well you have muscle fatigue, for example, safety factors, what's going on with your cardivascular system, and we don't really know where that level is in high endurance running, which is part of the reason we're trying to do this now."

Melissa Crocker will run her first marathon Sunday during Bass Pro Shops Outdoor Fitness Festival. She decided to participate in the study with her father who read an article about it and decided to take part…

"It will be interesting to help with the study and help them with what they're trying to research."

Crocker, who has been running for 10 to 15 years says she’s not concerned at all about swallowing the CorTemp device…

"The way that it was described to me was that it would be the size of a multi-vitamin, so it won't be a problem and not a concern of mine."

Dr. Huckfeldt hopes the pilot study Sunday will set the stage for a more definitive study in the near future. He says the study results could benefit not only runners but those who work in hot environments such as firefighters.
He hopes to have 20 to 30 runners signed up to take part in the study this weekend. He says, at last check, they were nowhere near that goal, and he invites runners to still sign up.
 

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