Citation

Zhang Y, Bishop PA. Front. Sports Act. Living 2019; 1: e68.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2019, Frontiers Media)

DOI

10.3389/fspor.2019.00068

PMID

33344991 PMCID

Abstract

It has been well-documented that spinal cord injury (SCI), especially with resultant tetraplegia or high level paraplegia (T6 and above) (Price and Campbell, 2003), leads to disrupted somatic, sensory, and autonomic functions below the level of lesion (Cruz and Blauwet, 2018; Walter and Krassioukov, 2018), thereby compromising the heat dissipation mechanisms (Price and Trbovich, 2018). The current consensus when it comes to exercise and sports in the heat is that athletes with SCI, multiple sclerosis, or cerebral palsy (another neuromuscular disorder affecting thermoregulation) are more susceptible to hyperthermia than able-bodied athletes (Lepretre et al., 2016). The purpose of this review was to examine the published evidence to assess the risk of heat injury during competition and training in SCI athletes and use this information to provide a basis for improved protection for these sports.

Empirical evidence to date, however, is notably limited regarding the assumed risks of heat injury among this cohort (Price, 2016), which could be due to a very small incidence count, lack of resources, or failures to collect data (Trbovich et al., 2019). Grobler et al. (2019), for the first time, reported accurate medical records (level III evidence) during the 2015 IPC Athletics World Championships held in the heat (venue wet-bulb globe temperature 24.6-36.0°C). According to their field data, not only was the incidence rate of all illnesses (37.6 per 1,000 para athletes) low in comparison to that from outdoor IAAF World Championships between 2009 and 2017 (50.2 per 1,000 able-bodied athletes) (Edouard et al., 2019), but it was also explicitly low in heat illness (seven recorded cases of heat illness, of which there was only one case of athlete with SCI).

Language: en

Keywords

hyperthermia; paralympic; paraplegia; tetraplegia; thermoregulation