Besides the vision research that I already mentioned, I’m involved in one other clinical study. In the main study, I’ll sleep in a sleep lab where I’ll be monitored during the night. Then in the morning, I’ll complete some kind of aptitude test. I’m a healthy control that they’ll be comparing to patients with sleep apnea, the hypothesis being that people with sleep apnea will do worse on the tests because they have interrupted sleep.
Today I participated in what they call a companion study — basically since the group I’m working with is already getting a bunch of sleep apnea patients into the sleep lab, the second group is teaming up with them so that it doesn’t have to recruit its own research subjects. The companion study is looking at how sleep apnea and relates to someone’s capacity for exercise and their eating/exercise habits. To do that, I filled out some long questionnaires about my habits and then went to Brigham and Women’s Hospital to do a stress test.
The whole experience was a little weirder than I thought it would be, though everyone was really nice. I knew beforehand that during the test I would be riding a stationary bike for about 10 minutes with an EKG and some kind apparatus to measure my breathing. Clearly I didn’t know anything about an EKG before, because I imagined it to be something like three or four electrodes stuck to my chest. Turns out it takes TEN electrodes! I had to wear a gown an everything because there were so many. All the wires hooked into a heavy pouch that I wore around my waist like a fanny pack. After I got on the exercise bike, they staff brought out the breathing monitor. It was basically like the mouthpiece of a snorkel that was attached to a flexible tube. None of this was uncomfortable, but it was all a little awkward! If you want to get an approximation, you can put on a bathrobe, wear a fanny pack full of rocks and breathe through a snorkel while riding an exercise bike. I’m sure you will look just as awesome as I did!
The test itself was pretty easy. I sat still for a few minutes to get a baseline and then I started pedaling the bike. At first it was really easy. I was supposed to pedal just enough to keep my little monitor at 60 RPM, but it was pretty difficult to keep myself from going higher. The resistance was programed to steadily increase as I pedaled, though, so by the last few minutes it was getting really hard! In the end I rode for about 8 minutes before it got so hard that I couldn’t make my legs do 60 RPM anymore. When I was done, I had to lie down so they could check my recovery. Not counting the set-up, the whole test was under 15 minutes.
All in all they told me I have an appropriate response for a non-athlete person of my size. So I guess I’m not disastrously out of shape!
For Science! 