Cooper quoted in stories about heatstroke

Bud Cooper, clinical professor and clinical education coordinator in the Mary Frances Early College of Education’s Department of Kinesiology, was recently quoted in multiple stories about the effects of heatstroke after the death of a college wrestler in Kentucky.

The student athlete, Grant Brace, died of exertional heatstroke after wrestling practice in August 2020.

Brace and his teammates began practice with weightlifting and drills for hand-fighting, a type of close-range, hand-to-hand combat in wrestling, according to the police report referenced by WKRC. Afterward, he and teammates began sprints up a hill with a steep incline, where Brace first showed signs of fatigue.

“Usually with heatstroke, individuals have lost consciousness. You can pick them out. You will start to see them. They will lose their ability to continue an activity. They’ll be lethargic. They’ll have an inability to communicate,” Cooper told the New York Post.

After the practice, Brace and teammates went to the wrestling room, where his condition worsened—he asked for water, tried to cool himself with ice, and eventually ran out of the gym, the police report states. His body was found two hours later near the campus’s fountain, which was not working and didn’t contain water.

Cooper told WKRC that heatstroke is when the body’s core temperature reaches above 104 degrees Fahrenheit, the highest of four heat categories.

“Here it is critical to cool the core body temperature down because in that elevated temperature state, the amount of time that you can survive is limited,” Cooper said.

Read the stories on the WKRC and New York Post websites.