John Sutton Memorial Lecture

Nisha Charkoudian, PhD

Sex as a Biological Variable in Human Thermoregulation: Implications for Heat Illness Risk

For decades, women were considered to be “less heat tolerant” than men, based on poorly controlled or anecdotal information.  Unfortunately, assumptions like these led to exclusion of women from some endurance sports - for example, women could not “legally” run in the Boston Marathon until 1972. More recently, evidence points to quantitative influences of female reproductive hormones on thermoregulatory mechanisms, but these do not appear to have a negative influence on over