Applied Sports Science newsletter – August 18, 2020

Applied Sports Science news articles, blog posts and research papers for August 18, 2020

 

Serena Williams’ Migraines

MedPage Today, Michele R. Berman, MD, and Mark S. Boguski, MD, PhD from

… “Migraine isn’t a knee injury — it’s something you can’t physically see,” she said. “You can’t really say, ‘Oh, Dad, I have a migraine. I’m going to stop playing.’ People are like, ‘I don’t see swelling. I don’t see bruising. Tough it out.’ I got used to playing through the pain.”

Fortunately, Williams’ migraine attacks were infrequent enough that she was, for the most part, able to deal with them. Fast forward to this year and the pandemic quarantine. Williams said that being at home with husband Alexis Ohanian and their almost 3-year-old daughter Olympia was “incredibly stressful” and triggered migraines nearly every day. She spoke to her doctor, who prescribed ubrogepant (Ubrelvy). She says it worked so well that she signed up to be a spokesperson for the medication.


U.S. Women’s National Team Program is Focused on the Season Ahead

USA Hockey, Mae Divinski from

As the 2020-21 hockey season approaches and the 2022 Olympic Winter Games less than two years away, the U.S. Women’s National Team Program is not wasting any time improving and dialing in their training methods. For four nights last week, the current player pool spent two hours together, virtually, each evening to learn from and engage with the team’s coaches, trainers and staff. Each session covered different elements on developing as an athlete and as a teammate on the ice.

The week’s virtual meetings kicked off Monday night with Bob Corkum, head coach of the U.S. Women’s National Team. He started with a presentation breaking down the fundamentals and foundation of the team’s overall strategy. It was refresher for many, and for others it offered a new insight into the program.

“This is something we are going to build on for everything that we do from here on out, right towards the Olympics,” said Corkum. “When we’re playing our best hockey, we’re doing these things instinctively.”


Life in quarantine: Inside a pro sports team’s enduring of a COVID-19 outbreak

Yahoo Sports, Henry Bushnell from

He received the news over FaceTime. The following morning, nurses in hazmat suits arrived outside his door. And on an early-July day he won’t forget, at a Walt Disney World resort he didn’t see much of, he packed his belongings and covered himself head-to-toe. He trudged up to the 14th floor of his hotel. He already missed fresh air. He now knew he’d go two weeks without it. Because he — an FC Dallas player who agreed to speak with Yahoo Sports anonymously — had tested positive for COVID-19.

We’ll call him David. He half-expected the news when it came, just days before the MLS is Back Tournament. Symptoms had begun to stew. “Some body aches,” he says. “A fever. Some night sweats. But a lot of other teammates had it worse.” Ten ultimately tested positive for the coronavirus in Florida. The team had to withdraw from the tournament. Players spent much of their two-week bubble adventure in quarantine. They sat in mostly barren hotel rooms, watching the rest of the league march on without them.


Young children would rather explore than get rewards

Ohio State University, Ohio State News from

Young children will pass up rewards they know they can collect to explore other options, a new study suggests.

Researchers found that when adults and 4- to 5-year-old children played a game where certain choices earned them rewards, both adults and children quickly learned what choices would give them the biggest returns.

But while adults then used that knowledge to maximize their prizes, children continued exploring the other options, just to see if their value may have changed.

“Exploration seems to be a major driving force during early childhood – even outweighing the importance of immediate rewards,” said Vladimir Sloutsky, co-author of the study and professor of psychology at The Ohio State University.


Linking sight and movement – Researchers key in on finding that can help self-driving cars ‘see’

Harvard Gazette from

To better understand the relationship between movement and vision, a team of Harvard researchers looked at what happens in one of the brain’s primary regions for analyzing imagery when animals are free to roam naturally. The results of the study, published Tuesday in the journal Neuron, suggest that image-processing circuits in the primary visual cortex not only are more active when animals move, but that they receive signals from a movement-controlling region of the brain that is independent from the region that processes what the animal is looking at. In fact, the researchers describe two sets of movement-related patterns in the visual cortex that are based on head motion and whether an animal is in the light or the dark.


A Radical New Model of the Brain Illuminates Its Wiring

WIRED, Science, Grace Huckins from

… Operating under the assumption that different parts of the brain have separate functions, neuroscientists have made remarkable progress toward understanding how the brain works. They have discovered that vision happens at the back of the head, that a tiara of tissue at the top of the brain sends commands to the muscles so that the body can move, and that a small structure beneath the ear has the specific responsibility of recognizing faces. All of these regions are made of gray matter, a type of tissue that contains neuron cell bodies and covers the surface of the brain. Underneath lies the white matter, which stretches in bundles of fiber between regions of gray matter and carries messages all over the brain. But though figuring out the function of a particular piece of gray matter can be straightforward enough—look for someone with damage to that area and see what they are unable to do—white matter has proven more difficult to pin down. “For a long time, we’ve been ignoring that connectivity because we didn’t know how to talk about it,” says Danielle Bassett, professor of bioengineering at the University of Pennsylvania.

In the past few decades, however, researchers like Bassett have leveraged new brain-imaging technologies and mathematical tools to start probing the mysteries of these


How Big Data Is Revolutionizing Sleep Science and Health

insideBIGDATA from

… Today, sleep data can be collected more comfortably, affordably, and (what’s most important) on a large scale. That’s all thanks to new tools for collecting data – various wearable sensors that provide real-time data on a large number of factors that can affect how someone sleeps. We’re talking headbands, watches, rings, bracelets, and even mattresses equipped with sensors that can provide even more data.

With these new sources of data, sleep scientists have far more to work with, including much more data from “healthy” sleepers whose sleep had been hitherto studied far less since most people undergoing polysomnography had been people with sleep disorders.

The amount of data collected via these new sources is truly staggering. Back in 2015, Fullpower, one of the leaders in sleep tracking technology whose solutions have been incorporated in products from different manufacturers, said they had data on 250 million nights of sleep. There are also organizations such as Sleepdata.org, which offer enormous datasets collected from various studies and through various methods.


Orthopedic field awaits impact of artificial intelligence

Healio, Orthopedics Today from

… By using registry data, including demographic and comorbidity information, preoperative disability mental health scores and radiographic measurements, Christopher P. Ames, MD, of University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), noted AI prediction models could be used to assist in real-time decision-making for patient care and treatment by preoperatively predicting major postoperative complications, as well as risk of reoperation and of readmission based on patient and surgical factors. Models can also be created to predict the specific type of benefit of a surgical procedure to an individual patient including precise patient-weighted priorities, such as ability to return to work or decreased pain medication usage, according to Ames.

“Immediately at the point of care, we can give [patients] the risk-benefit profile that is accurate and has been validated, and we can adjust the surgical variables, as well as show patients in real-time the risk/outcome benefit of preoperative physical conditioning or smoking cessation” Ames told Orthopedics Today.


Inside A Day In The Life Of A Physician In The NBA Bubble

Forbes, Chris Cason from

… Player health was at the forefront of the restart. That included the threat of the coronavirus and injuries after a four-month layoff. Nwachukwu believes the scrimmage and seeding games were very critical because going right into playoff-intensity basketball would have increased the risk of soft-tissue injuries. Those games also allowed teams to customize the ramp ups of individual players who were all at varying levels of conditioning with some having had access to private gyms during the shutdown while others didn’t.

Unfortunately, with any return to play, there is the risk of associated injuries. Ben Simmons, Jaren Jackson Jr. and Johnathan Issac all went down with season-ending-lower-body injuries within the first two weeks of play. Nwachukwu compares the NBA’s restart to that of the German Bundesliga, which had their own restart in late May and saw 14 injuries the first weekend. He believes the league has done really well in acclimating the players back into game-shape.


Should high schools with remote learning play sports?

Twitter, Aspen Inst Sports from

@zbinney_NFLinj
says an argument could be made that classrooms are riskier and certain sports would give youth some normalcy. On the other hand: “It feels like something we shouldn’t be prioritizing.”


Student-athletes report anxiety and depression without ability to play sports amid pandemics

Austin American-Statesman, USA Today Network, Greg Tufaro from

While many Texas public schools have begun their athletic seasons, an increasing number of schools boards across the country will cancel the fall sports calendar because of the coronavirus pandemic.

The decision to do so will have a profound adverse impact on the mental health and well-being of student-athletes, according to the results of a national survey recently conducted by Tim McGuine, a sports medicine researcher at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health.

McGuine was the lead researcher on a recent national survey of high school athletes, which illustrated that the cancellation of youth sports during the coronavirus pandemic has taken a significant toll on the mental health and well-being of student-athletes.


Potential COVID-related heart issues raise concerns for athletes across sports

USA Today Sports, Steve Gardner from

Even if they recover in the short-term, there is a growing concern that athletes who have contracted COVID-19 might face potentially greater long-term health effects.

Recent studies have shown an alarming number of cases of myocarditis, or inflammation of the heart muscle, in people who previously tested positive for coronavirus but no longer have symptoms. The Journal of the American Medical Association recently published results from a study of 100 patients who had recovered from COVID-19. Heart imaging showed “cardiac involvement” in 78% of the patients and 60% “ongoing myocardial inflammation” among the participants.

NCAA Chief Medical Officer Dr. Brian Hainline said Thursday during a media briefing hosted by the Infectious Diseases Society of America that of the 1%-2% of athletes at NCAA institutions who have tested positive for COVID-19, at least a dozen have been later found to have myocarditis.


Every deal in professional sports is based on data

Dataconomy, Omri Orgad from

Professional sports lend themselves really well to economic calculations – players, coaches, and agents act similarly to the hypothetical, rational decision-makers in economic models. While this data may seem complex or hard to obtain, it’s actually all readily available online – you just need to know where to look, how to gather it and how to use it and draw your insights based on it.


Oregon State President F. King Alexander, a former college athlete, goes deep on future of Beavers athletics: Q&A

The Oregonian/OregonLive , Nick Daschel from

… [F. King] Alexander calls the current climate a “Cold War of spending.” He plainly does not believe it’s healthy for college athletics to pay assistant football coaches more than $2 million per year, and construct lavish locker rooms costing in excess of $30 million.

Alexander believes it will take federal intervention to put the brakes on spending.

“This spending war that’s going on cannot continue, or it will blow our conferences apart,” Alexander said. “I worry what happens to Washington State, Oregon State, Arizona.”


Could Student Athlete Health Insurance Delay Return of College Sports?

Sportico; Michael McCann, Emily Caron, Eben Novy-Williams from

As the Big Ten and Pac-12 become the latest conferences to cancel sports this fall, Sportico has learned that some schools are worried that potential insurance costs could scrap additional seasons.

The concerns stem mainly from one of the NCAA Board of Governors’ “specific requirements” for return-to-play:

Member schools, in conjunction with existing insurance standards, must cover COVID-19 related medical expenses for student-athletes to prevent out-of-pocket expenses for college athletes and their families.

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