WHAT ARE WE LOOKING FOR?


Marilyn Sharp, right, the USARIEM principal investigator in the OPAT research effort, consults with a drill sergeant before gathering physiological data that helped set physical standards for about 100,000 recruits and thousands of cadets training for various military occupational specialties. OPAT sought to identify the key physical capabilities Army recruits needed to succeed in one of the seven combat specialties. (U.S. Army photo by David Kamm, RDECOM)


USARIEM researchers will be track- ing 4,000 recruits throughout and for two years after basic combat training to identify risk factors and evaluate the effectiveness of ongoing musculoskeletal injury prevention and related initiatives.


Bullets and rockets are not the only things servicemen and women con- tend with when they deploy. Often, gastrointestinal


illnesses, like travel-


ers’ diarrhea, can decrease Soldiers’ performance,


prompting USARIEM’s


Nutrition Interventions. For the last few years, researchers from USARIEM and the Combat Feeding Directorate of the U.S. Army Natick Soldier Research, Development and Engineering Cen- ter (NSRDEC), an element of the U.S. Army Research, Development and Engi- neering Command (RDECOM), have been working together to understand the complex relationship between our health and the tens of trillions of micro- organisms—including at least 1,000 known species of bacteria—living in our intestines. USARIEM researchers have conducted a series of field studies, from Natick to Pikes Peak in Colorado to Nor- way to characterize how different military stressors affect the gut microbiome and impact warfighter health. Some of these studies have shown that high altitudes,


high physical stress and diet affect Sol- diers’ gut health. USARIEM researchers plan to start testing for dietary interven- tions based on the findings of these and future gut health studies.


CONCLUSION In the perpetually changing world of U.S. military S&T, HPO is one of the newer terms and efforts. Yet USARIEM has been doing research on HPO for decades and will continue to do so. By tapping into civilian and military expertise in performance,


nutrition,


environmen-


tal stressors and modeling, as well as additional local and international part- nerships with academic, federal and commercial knowledge and research assets, USARIEM has been able to generate knowledge, products and tech- nologies that optimize the performance of servicemen and women throughout their careers.


For more information, go to www.usariem. army.mil.


DR. STEPHEN MUZA is the deputy director, science and technology, at USARIEM. He holds a Ph.D. in physiology and biophysics from the University of Kentucky, an M.S. in physiology and


pharmacology from the University of North Dakota and a B.A. from Miami University. After seven years of active-duty service in the U.S. Air Force and the U.S. Army, he served in a civilian research physiologist position in 1991 and became USARIEM’s Termal and Mountain Medicine Division chief in 2012. He was appointed to his current post in September 2016. In addition to conducting numerous hypobaric chamber and Pikes Peak research studies, he has led biomedical expeditions to the base of Mount Everest, Nepal, and the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro, Tanzania. He is an international expert in environmental physiology and medicine with an emphasis in high-altitude medicine, and serves on many scientific panels, including those of the U.S. Army Medical Research and Materiel Command and the Defense Health Agency.


MS. MALLORY ROUSSEL is a science writer for the Science Strategic Manage- ment Office of USARIEM and a research fellow in the Oak Ridge Institute of Science and Education program. She holds a B.A. in English from Boston University. She has written about diverse subjects, from anatomic avatars to mission planning tech- nology and military nutrition interventions.


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