Sports « Weekly Gravy

Squats and lunges aren’t the most fun exercises, but a new study says they’ll help save your knees. Folks with strong quads building up their thighs appear to be less likely to require a total knee replacement, according to a presentation scheduled for Monday at a meeting of the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA) in Chicago. Stronger muscles are generally associated with a lower rate of total knee replacement, researchers said in background notes. However, it’s been unclear whether people benefit more from stronger extensor muscles like the quadriceps, which extend the leg, or stronger flexor muscles like hamstrings that bend the leg. “Our study shows that in addition to strong muscles individually, larger extensor muscle groups — relative to hamstring muscle groups — are significantly associated with lower odds of total knee replacement surgery in two to four years,” said Dr. Upasana Upadhyay Bharadwaj, a research fellow in radiology at the University of California-San Francisco School of Medicine. About 14 million U.S. adults have knee arthritis, and more than half will eventually require knee replacement surgery, researchers said. The quads and the hamstrings are of particular interest because they’re the two most important muscle groups to the knee. The quads are located on the front of the thigh. They are the strongest muscle group in the body and are essential to a person’s… read on > read on >

TUESDAY, Nov. 14, 2023 (Healthday News) — There is nothing worse for your heart than sitting, a new study confirms. “The big takeaway from our research is that while small changes to how you move can have a positive effect on heart health, intensity of movement matters,” said study first author Dr. Jo Blodgett, a research fellow with University College London’s Institute of Sport, Exercise & Health. “The most beneficial change we observed was replacing sitting with moderate to vigorous activity — which could be a run, a brisk walk or stair climbing — basically any activity that raises your heart rate and makes you breathe faster, even for a minute or two,” Blodgett added in a university news release. However, even standing and sleeping beat sitting when it came to heart health, the study found. Heart disease is the leading cause of mortality worldwide. In 2021, it was responsible for one in three deaths, and the number of people living with heart disease across the world has doubled since 1997, the researchers said. “We already know that exercise can have real benefits for your cardiovascular health and this encouraging research shows that small adjustments to your daily routine could lower your chances of having a heart attack or stroke,” said James Leiper, associate medical director at the British Heart Foundation, which funded the research.… read on > read on >

Playing professional football, especially if you are a lineman, may shorten your life, a new study suggests. The University of Minnesota researchers thought that perhaps professional football players are unlike “American men in general” in ways that determine their future health. “When we started digging into the literature on later life health outcomes for professional American football players, we were initially surprised to find a relatively large number of studies that found football players lived longer than American men in general,” said study co-author Gina Rumore. She is program development director of the university’s Institute for Social Research and Data Innovation. “We believe a better strategy for understanding the association between playing football and mortality is to compare football players to men who are like them in every respect — except they never played professional football,” Rumore added in a university news release. So, the researchers compared men drafted to play professional football in the 1950s, some of whom played and some of whom never played in any professional league. The investigators then compared professional football players who began their careers in the late 1980s through the mid-1990s to a nationally representative group of men who were employed, not disabled, not poor and who had completed at least three years of college. The first analysis showed that linemen die earlier than otherwise similar men. In… read on > read on >

The ancient art of tai chi, plus a modern twist, may help older adults reverse mild declines in brain power, a new clinical trial reveals. Researchers found that tai chi classes helped older adults improve their subtle problems with cognition (memory and thinking skills). It also helped them with a fundamental multitasking skill: walking while your attention is elsewhere. But while tai chi was effective, a “cognitively enhanced” version that added mental challenges to the mix worked even better, the study found. Experts called the findings — published Oct. 31 in the Annals of Internal Medicine — promising. They support the concept of stimulating seniors’ minds in multiple ways, rather than one. Tai chi is a traditional Chinese practice that combines slow, graceful movement and physical postures with controlled breathing. It’s performed as a moving meditation, and studies over the years have found that it can help older people improve their balance and lower their risk of falls. There is also evidence that tai chi can help seniors sharpen their cognition, said Peter Harmer, a researcher on the new trial. His team wanted to test the effects of adding specific mental challenges to the tai chi practice — based on recent studies suggesting that physical and mental exercise together are better than either alone. Conventional tai chi classes, like most physical exercise classes, are primarily… read on > read on >

Working out offers a lot of health benefits, and the risks are astonishingly small, according to a new study from the United Kingdom. “This work demonstrates that engaging in fitness activities is overwhelmingly a safe and beneficial pursuit,” said study co-author Dr. Sean Williams, a researcher at the University of Bath Center for Health and Injury and Illness Prevention in Sport. “While no physical activity is entirely without risk, the chance of serious injury is exceedingly low when compared to the myriad health and wellness advantages gained from staying active,” Williams continued in a university news release. The five-year study found that even forms of exercise sometimes considered risky by the public, such as road cycling, are generally safe. Data for the study came from hospitals in England and Wales. The researchers found that between 2012 and 2017, nearly 12,000 trauma injuries resulted from sports and exercise. The study looked at 61 sports and other physical activities to provide a comparable estimate of the risks to participants. Running, golf, dance classes and gym sessions were the least likely to result in injury. Running had in 0.70 injuries, golf 1.25 injuries and fitness classes just 0.10 per 100,000 participants a year. Among the most popular sports, soccer had the highest injury incidence rate at 6.56 injuries per 100,000 participants a year. The authors characterized this as… read on > read on >

Even a little exercise can counter the harms of sitting all day, a new study suggests. Prolonged sitting raises your odds for an early death, but just 20 to 25 minutes of physical activity a day may offset that risk, researchers found. “If people, for any reason, are sedentary for most of the day, small amounts of physical activity will still lower the risk of death substantially,” said lead researcher Edvard Sagelv, from UiT The Arctic University of Norway, in Tromso. That can even include light intensity exercise like cleaning. For the study, Sagelv and his team reviewed data on nearly 12,000 older adults. They found that being sedentary for over 12 hours a day — perhaps either watching TV or sitting at a desk — raised the risk of early death, but only in those getting less than 22 minutes of moderate exercise a day. “Individuals doing more than 22 minutes of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity per day, the equivalent of the World Health Organization’s 150 minutes per week guidelines, had no increased risk of death with more sedentary time,” Sagelv said. This study, however, can’t prove that exercise alone lowered the risk of premature death, only that there appears to be an association. Still, the study “is a reaffirmation of our fundamental need to move our bodies if they are to reward us with… read on > read on >

Getting a certain number of steps each day can help people improve their fitness, but new research shows it also can pay off in the operating room. The odds of complications within 90 days after hospital discharge were reduced by half if a patient was getting more than 7,500 steps a day before their procedure, the study found. These postoperative complications typically occur after a patient returns home. About 30% of patients suffer these problems, which can include infection, blood clots and wound complications. “I think it’s probably more an assessment of an individual’s overall fitness and their health generally,” said study co-author Dr. Anai Kothari, an assistant professor with a specialty in surgical oncology at the Medical College of Wisconsin. “We use a lot of information to try to decide and think through surgical risk. My hope is that this is an additional point of reference that practitioners can use.” Surgeons can already better understand a person’s risk by knowing they have certain health conditions, such as diabetes, Kothari said. Knowing how active that patient is could add information about their risks. What do the results tell doctors? “[The] first is we can actually use wearable devices to give us insight into a domain of their health and fitness that we may previously not have had an opportunity to do. This can be a… read on > read on >

Heated yoga classes can help some people with depression feel a lot better within a couple months — even if they practice just once a week, a small clinical trial suggests. The study, of 65 people with moderate-to-severe depression, found that those randomly assigned to heated yoga classes saw a greater symptom improvement over eight weeks than those assigned to a waitlist. Overall, 16 patients, or 59%, “responded” to the yoga classes — meaning the severity of their depression symptoms dropped by at least half. Only two patients on the waitlist (6%) saw their symptoms improve that much. Beyond that, 12 patients in the yoga group, or 44%, saw their depression go into remission. The findings, published Oct. 23 in the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, add to evidence that yoga can help people deal with mental health conditions. The twist was the heat. Study participants took class in a room heated to 105 degrees and followed a traditional Bikram yoga sequence — a set of 26 postures that is the same each class. It’s not clear, though, whether the heat was the key ingredient, said lead researcher Maren Nyer, an assistant professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and director of yoga studies at Massachusetts General Hospital. Because the comparison was a waitlist, she said, the benefits could have come from the yoga, the heat… read on > read on >

Use of steroids among high school athletes is a continuing problem, and now new research finds these youths are also more likely to suffer a concussion while they play. The study was published Oct. 20 in the Journal of Osteopathic Medicine. “The neurobehavioral shifts of steroid use may lead to increased aggressive play and a subsequent heightened risk for concussions,” said researcher Kennedy Sherman, of Oklahoma State University College of Osteopathic Medicine at Cherokee Nation. “Moreover, athletes using steroids are likely to have higher muscle volume and increased muscle strength, amplifying the momentum and impact of head-on collisions,” Sherman added in a journal news release. “Steroid use and concussions each have numerous health consequences, and when occurring together in a person, these effects may be amplified.” Researchers used data from a Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System survey, finding that 3.7% of young athletes reported previous steroid use. About 20.7% of all athletes reported having sustained a concussion. Among those who did not use steroids, nearly 20% reported a concussion, compared to about 55% of those who did use steroids. The good news? The prevalence of steroid use among high school athletes decreased from 3.4% in 1999 to 1.9% in 2019. The highest rates were in 2001 and 2003, at 5.3% and 4.4%, respectively. Use varied across ethnic groups. The highest rate was seen in the… read on > read on >

Kids who get discouraged by idealized athletic bodies on social media may end up dropping out of sports, a small study suggests. In a preliminary study of 70 kids who played — or used to play — sports, researchers found that some had quit because they thought they didn’t have the “right” body for the activity. And most got that idea from media images, including TikTok and Instagram posts. Experts said the findings add to evidence that unrealistic, often “filtered” or “edited,” images on social media can make some kids feel bad about their own bodies. And in the case of kids who play sports, the study suggests, those feelings could translate into action: quitting. That outcome would be “heartbreaking,” said researcher Dr. Cassidy Foley Davelaar, considering all that kids can gain from participating in sports. It benefits their physical health, she said, and helps them form friendships, build confidence and resilience, and more. Sports should “be inclusive of all body sizes and shapes,” said Foley Davelaar, a sports medicine physician at Nemours Children’s Health in Orlando, Fla. She is scheduled to present the findings Sunday at a meeting of the American Academy of Pediatrics, in Washington, D.C. Studies released at meetings are generally considered preliminary until they are published in a peer-reviewed journal. While this study was small, it aligns with other research tying… read on > read on >