American College of Sports Medicine Roundtable on Exertional Heat Stroke V Return to Duty/Return to Play

http://www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?AD=ADA529041&Location=U2&doc=GetTRDoc.pdf

American College of Sports Medicine Roundtable on
Exertional Heat Stroke V Return to Duty/Return
to Play: Conference Proceedings


O’CONNOR, F.G., D.J. CASA, M.F. BERGERON, R. CARTER, P. DEUSTER, Y. HELED, J. KARK, L. LEON,
B. MCDERMOTT, K. O’BRIEN, W.O. ROBERTS, and M. SAWKA. American college of sports medicine roundtable on exertional heat stroke V return to duty/return to play: conference proceedings. Curr. Sports Med. Rep., Vol. 9, No. 5, pp. 314-321, 2010. On October 22-23, 2008, an ACSM Roundtable was convened at the Uniformed Services University (Bethesda, MD)
to discuss return-to-play or return-to-duty for people who have experienced exertional heat illness (EHI) and to develop consensus-based recommendations. The conference assembled experts from the civilian sports medicine community and the Department of Defense to
discuss relevant EHI issues, such as potential long-term consequences, the concept of thermotolerance, and the role of thermal tolerance testing in return-to-play decisions. Although the group was unable to move forward with new consensus recommendations, they clearly
documented critical clinical concerns and scientific questions, including the following: 1) no uniform core definitions of EHI; 2) limited validated criteria to assess recovery from exertional heat stroke (EHS); and 3) inadequate ability to predict who may be predisposed to a subsequent heat injury after EHS. Areas of potential future research are identified.