Cardiorespiratory Fitness clinical trials

Firefighter Cardiorespiratory Fitness (CRF) Pilot Study

Cardiorespiratory fitness is of vital importance to firefighters and yet is rarely, if ever, tested in a systematic fashion over the course of an individual firefighter's career. Investigators know that there are incremental health benefits to increased levels of fitness and reduced morbidity and mortality associated with lower levels of fitness. The proposed study will address this gap by enrolling up to 135 firefighters from local metropolitan fire departments. The goal of this cross-sectional correlational study is to address which body composition methods best correlate with cardiorespiratory fitness (CRF) in firefighters in order to define a method to combine data into a risk score predictive of fitness. Specifically, this study will 1) measure body composition data and evaluate the correlation of BMI with non-BMI body composition measures, such as body fat percentage (BF%), lean body mass percentage (LBM%), or waist circumference (WC), 2) measure cardiorespiratory fitness in terms of VO2max and evaluate the correlation of body composition measures such as BMI, BF%, LBM%, and/or WC with VO2max,, 3) evaluate diagnostic test metrics, such as sensitivity and specificity, of population meeting obesity criteria by BMI and WC, as compared to BF% as the reference standard, 4) develop a cardiorespiratory fitnessscore (CVFS) from a conjunction of body composition measures (BMI, as BF%, LBM%, WC) and demographic variables that is well-correlated with measured VO2max, evaluate the CVFS performance in age and gender-stratified subpopulations relative to the accepted standard of gender-stratified VO2max criteria, and identify age and gender-stratified CVFS threshold and diagnostic test performance; and 5) correlate CVFS performance with cardiovascular risk measures. Results of this analysis will provide pilot data and inform future work to assess whether providing more accurate data on body composition can lead to more effective reductions in cardiorespiratory risk in this population.