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Student's energy drink research gets published in professional journal
by Kristin Lukowski of The Michigan Catholic
Published November 13, 2009
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Kristin Lukowski | The Michigan Catholic
Brendan O’Neil, a seventh-grader at Everest Academy, said he wants to be a physician or an engineer when he’s older. |
Clarkston - Like any good scientist, Brendan O'Neil had a scientific theory and completed experiments to test that. Then he did more research a year later, and eventually had his results published in a medical journal.
What's so surprising about that? He's 12. And his experiments were conducted as part of his fifth- and sixth-grade science fair projects.
Brendan is now in the seventh grade at Everest Academy, Clarkston, and gets A's in math and science. He said he is "amazed" by all kinds of science, so he doesn't have a favorite yet, and is thinking about a career as an emergency room physician, like his father, Brian, or perhaps a construction engineer.
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Kristin Lukowski | The Michigan Catholic
The results of Brendan O’Neil’s recent science fair projects were published in a medical journal, even though he’s 12. |
Brendan explained that every year, Everest has a science fair in February, for which students are required to submit projects as entries. "My dad told me to do something I liked," he said - so for his fifth-grade year, he put his love for sports drinks, especially the caffeinated, sugary drink Monster together with his love for sports. (He plays football and baseball for Everest.)
He set up three stations in a meeting room at Beaumont Hospital in Royal Oak, where his dad was an emergency room physician at the time, to test fitness, dexterity and reaction time. At the fitness station, hospital staff volunteers completed as many sit-ups and pushups as they could in a minute; for dexterity, they were timed using a Purdue Pegboard, a small wooden board in which small pegs must be inserted; and for reaction time, they were tested by playing the video game Mario Super Smash Brothers Melee, a fighting game, for which he subtracted their "damage taken" score from their "damage given" score for a final total.
For Brendan's sixth-grade science fair project, he decided to do more research for the same project, so he could have more results from a bigger pool of people, more than 30 for both years. His dexterity and physical fitness tests were the same, but he changed the video game to test reaction time, as players could be randomly pressing buttons for the Mario Brothers game instead of actually reacting.
The second year, he used the game Guitar Hero, a game in which a gamer plays a song on a plastic guitar in time to what's shown on the screen. If the volunteer hadn't played it before, he let them warm up on a different song and set the level to "easy"; if the volunteer was a regular player, he set the level for one harder than he or she was used to.
To test if Monster energy drink really made a difference, he had volunteers drink either that or Sprite, a non-caffeinated soda, and mixed in a powdered drink flavoring so they couldn't tell what they were drinking, and perform the tests one to four hours later. He also tested the effects of each drink on different days, so the Monster drink's caffeine wouldn't still be in the volunteers' system. And for the video games, he tested volunteers three times for each drink and took the average. He also had their blood pressure and heart rate tested to see if the drink had any effect.
But like any scientist knows, the research is only the beginning. It took Brendan time to enter all his findings into the computer and make charts and graphs out of it, taking care to make sure it was all labeled correctly. "It took a lot of time, from all the games they had to play," he said.
His findings: The only thing Monster had an effect on was reaction time playing the video games, and that was a slight effect. Neither exercise performance nor dexterity were affected.
Brendan said he was surprised by his results. "I was expecting Monster to have a bigger effect," he said. "Energy drinks say they're going to do so much, but they're not."
After the science fair - for which he didn't win any awards - he figured he was done with the project for good. He found out later, however, that his father had submitted his research to the Annals of Emergency Medicine, a medical journal; it was recently published regardless of Brendan's age. "At first I was a little scared, then excited," he said of having his work published.
Also, very recently, the Web site www.sciencebuddies.com, which gives ideas for school science projects, asked him if his project could be included on their Web site; he said yes.
Debra Houry, MD, co-chair of the American College of Emergency Physicians Research Forum and the director of the Center for Injury Control at Emory University, Atlanta, said Brendan's research was reviewed by a panel of emergency care researchers, who then thought it was worthy of presentation. His project was published in the September 2009 supplement to the Annals of Emergency Medicine.
She said Brendan's poster presentation was "well received" at an ACEP meeting in Boston. "While we frequently have investigators from fields other than emergency medicine present research, it is unusual to have such a young presenter (and I cannot recall having a younger presenter at the ACEP Research Forum)," she said in an e-mail.
Richard Cross, dean of students for the boys' school at Everest, said such an experiment is typical for Brendan. "It doesn't surprise me that he comes up with these creative ideas," he said. "Brendan tends to think outside the box."
Brendan, who is a member of St. Daniel Parish, Clarkston, likes playing video games and sports and hanging out with his friends when he's not conducting scientific experiments. He said he hasn't thought of a project yet for this year's science fair - but he still enjoys Monster energy drink.
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