Contributing to our Health -- A Series About StFX Research Making A Difference In Our Communities
StFX is a leader in health innovation and entrepreneurship in Nova Scotia. In this ongoing series, we proudly shine a spotlight on our health research leaders, research and community health partnerships and their impact. For more on the Contributing to our Health series, click the link below.
Contributing to our Health series
“As a woman in sport myself, I feel fortunate to be able to contribute to this field and make a difference for us women in sport so that training, performance, and health needs can be optimized.”- StFX student Samantha Fisher
Samantha Fisher, a fourth year honours human nutrition student from Gander, NL, has been working to close the gender gap and understand more about gastrointestinal symptoms during exercise specific to women.
As a recipient of the Scotia Scholar Undergraduate Research Award from Research Nova Scotia, she worked to shed light on the sex data gap within sport nutrition literature. She is supervised by StFX human nutrition professor Dr. Jennifer Jamieson.
In the past, women's participation in sport was lower than it is today, Ms. Fisher says, and consequently, there was less demand and interest in female-specific sport and exercise data.
“Due to this, most high-quality data have come from studies with male participants and this data is then generalized to female athletes. Men and women have an abundance of differences such as anatomical, physiological, and hormonal differences, thus, generalizing the findings from studies with male participants to females is not taking into consideration these differences that should be accounted for in thorough research.”
Women, she says, continue to be underrepresented in sport and exercise research today, and because of this, there is a lack of evidence-based guidelines for females in relation to sport and exercise which limits the understanding of women's needs for training and performance.
“Currently, we are focusing on the literature that involves gastrointestinal symptoms during exercise, and we have done a literature search to identify all the papers relevant to our area of interest. By using a standardized audit methodological process that was created to study sex differences in sport science research, each study will be analyzed to determine the underrepresentation of female athletes specific to gastrointestinal symptoms during exercise. Hopefully, highlighting this issue to researchers, publishers, and funding agencies can initiate the closing of this sex data gap and allow men and women to be equally represented in sport and exercise research,” she says.
Ms. Fisher says before this project, she was unaware of the underrepresentation of women in sports and exercise data.
“As a woman in sport myself, I feel fortunate to be able to contribute to this field and make a difference for us women in sport so that training, performance, and health needs can be optimized. I want to see women reach their highest potential, and having the opportunity to highlight this sex data gap in the literature pushes the research community one step further in doing so.
“Also, as an aspiring physician, partaking in this research project has given me invaluable experiences in conducting research, and has given me the confidence and desire to be a part of the research community today and in the future.”
Ms. Fisher says not only has she gained skills that will guide her throughout the rest of her education and future career, she’s had opportunity to begin her own research project, which is now her thesis for her honours degree. Getting involved in student research gives students autonomy in their work and is an amazing opportunity to work alongside your professors to learn from them, she says. “I would recommend to all students who are interested in pursuing research to reach out to their professors so that they can gain first-hand, invaluable learning experiences in research.”
