Running on Caffeine: Investigating the Effects of Caffeine on Mouse Physical Performance

McCollum, Gabriel

Running on Caffeine: Investigating the Effects of Caffeine on Mouse Physical Performance

Persistent URL

https://hdl.handle.net/10456/57645

Author(s)

McCollum, Gabriel

Date Issued

April 1, 2024

Abstract

The psychoactive stimulant caffeine is the most commonly used stimulant used worldwide with 85% of the American population consuming a caffeinated beverage each day (Mitchell et al. 2014). Caffeine has been shown to improve exercise performance when consumed in doses of 3-6 mg/kg body mass based on its ability to have increased effects on the respiratory, cardiovascular, and smooth muscle systems (Institute of Medicine (US) Committee on Military Nutrition Research 2001; Guest et al. 2021). Due to all of the potential advantages that caffeine gives its user during physical performance, it is on the banned substance list by the National Collegiate Athletic Association if the concentration in urine exceeds 15 μg/ml (Guest et al. 2021); (NCAA). This experiment aimed to determine if there was a significant difference in physical performances concerning caffeine in “legal” and “illegal” dosages as established by the NCAA and to determine if the ban was justified. This was done by the ingestion of three different doses of caffeine in six female C57BL/6J strain mice before a speed and endurance test on a modified treadmill. From the mouse speed test, only mouse 2 out of the six total mice increased top speed and duration at that speed as caffeine concentration intake increased (4:18 vs 4:34 vs 4:53). The other five showed a decrease in both parameters as caffeine intake increased. In the endurance test, results were inconclusive as exhaustion was not met at 1.4 km/hr when the treadmill had to be stopped due to restrictions imposed by the Animal Research Committee for the only two mice that were tested. From this experiment, the results went against the established literature and were too scattered to establish that physical performance increases with the increase in caffeine consumption and to determine if the ban by the NCAA is justified.

Major

Biology

First Reader(s)

Whitenack, Lisa B.