For young women working out on campus, don’t be alarmed if someone asks you to take part in an experiment. The experiment is real and it could help dispel some anecdotal “knowledge.”
Dr. Serge P. von Duvillard, health and human performance professor, is currently heading a study to determine if physically active women’s athletic performance affected during their menstrual cycle.
Why?
“Because some ladies claim that, depending where they are in their menstrual cycle, their performance declines,” von Duvillard said. And if anyone can find out, von Duvillard can.
He is a member and Fellow of the American College of Sports Medicine (FACSM) as well as a Fellow of the European College of Sports Medicine. The Yugoslavia native often serves on national and international committees for sports medicine and exercise science.
Von Duvillard wants to measure salivary concentrations of progesterone and estrogen to determine if there is a difference in physical performance between the two phases of a volunteer’s ovarian cycle.
“If they do differ, then we have good reason to say, ‘OK, there’s an effect,'” he said. “If there’s no difference, we can say, ‘Well, there’s no performance difference between those two phases of either group.'”
But if there is no difference, it could be the result of a psychological effect, according to von Duvillard. Graduate assistants, Stacey Stancik and Danny Irwin, will help with they study; Stancik will be conducting interviews since they will be of personal nature.
And why should ladies step up to be tested?
“Participants can increase their knowledge and understanding of the physiological factors and underlying mechanisms, which determine their performance,” Stancik said.
When testing the subjects, von Duvillard and his assistants will take samples before activity, at exhaustion and at different thresholds of aerobic and anaerobic metabolism. Volunteers will encounter varying power output while riding a cycle ergometer, which is a special stationary bicycle used in performance research and costs $65,000.
Other variables will include the oxygen and carbon dioxide levels as well as blood lactate concentrations. All three will be measured during the process.
As the women exercise on the cycle, saliva samples will be collected for analysis.
Researchers have known physical activity can have an effect on a woman’s biology. Serious runners sometimes have an absence of their regular menstrual cycle.
But von Duvillard hopes to see how the performance will coincide with the release of hormones and estrogen, in other words, how the biology will affect the physical activity.
And he suspects he knows what the answer will be.
Previously, he conducted a study measuring the blood lactates of 19 women in Austria and he believes the results from that experiment will be mimicked in the new tests.
“We found absolutely no difference,” he said.
Women between the ages of 18 and 35, who are physically active, but “not necessarily in super shape” would meet the criteria.
Volunteers would also need to have had regular cycles for the last six months and not be taking oral contraceptives.
Those wishing to volunteer should contactDr. von Duvillard at 903-886-5556 or Serge_VonDuvillard@TAMU-Commerce.edu.