Sports « Weekly Gravy

Women are more likely to lose more muscle mass during space flight than men, a new lab study suggests. Females participating in the extended bed rest study lost more leg muscle mass at two months than the men had lost at three months, results show. The findings “suggest that women are more susceptible to weightlessness-induced muscle atrophy,” researchers concluded in their report published recently in the Journal of Applied Physiology. NASA’s decision to diversify space crews in future spaceflight missions means that more women will be subject to the rigors of weightlessness, researchers said in background notes. For example, the agency intends to send the first woman to the moon in 2024, researchers said. To see how space travel might affect health, researchers recruited a group of people to spend extended periods in bed. Men spent 90 days and women 60 days in a bed tilted 6 degrees head down, placing their head below their feet. This simulates the weightlessness experienced while traveling through space, researchers said. Both volunteer groups ate, slept, cleaned up, and performed all other activities in either a head-down tilt or a horizontal position. MRI screenings of the volunteers’ thigh and calf muscles taken before, during and after the trial showed that all participants lost a significant amount of muscle mass in both areas of the leg, the researchers said. However,… read on > read on >

Head injuries related to football might be tied to markers of dementia like brain shrinkage and decreased blood flow to the brain, a new study of former pro and college players reports. The study looked at signs of injury to the brain’s white matter, called white matter hyperintensities. These are caused by reduced blood flow to white matter, which functions as the information highway connecting different parts of the brain. “Studies have shown that athletes exposed to repetitive head impacts can have increased white matter hyperintensity burden in their brains,” said researcher Michael Alosco, a neuropsychologist at Boston University Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine. “White matter hyperintensities are easily seen on MRI as markers of injury of various causes,” he continued in a news release. “We know these markers are more common as people age and with medical conditions such as high blood pressure, but these results provide initial insight that they may be related to multiple aspects of brain damage from repetitive head impacts.” For the study, Alosco’s team compared brain scans of 120 former pro football players and 60 former college players against 60 men who never played football and had no history of concussion. They found that the relationship between white matter hyperintensities and stroke risk was more than 11 times stronger in former football players than in those who never… read on > read on >

Elite athletes who suffer a sudden cardiac arrest might have genetics that make them more vulnerable to heart disease, a new study suggests. Analysis of more than 280 top-level endurance athletes revealed that 1 in 6 have measures that would normally suggest heart disease and reduced heart function, researchers report in the journal Circulation. Those athletes also carried a rich load of genes associated with heart disease, researchers said. “The phenomenon of the athletes’ heart has long been known, but we were the first team to investigate the role an athlete’s genetic makeup plays in their heart function and structure,” researcher Dr. Diane Fatkin, a molecular cardiologist at the Victor Chang Cardiac Research Institute in Sydney, said in a news release. “What we have found is that there are far more profound changes than thought and that a high number of these athletes do have altered heart function,” she continued. A series of recent near-tragedies on playing fields and in gymnasiums have prompted increased interest in how heavy exercise can affect the hearts of elite athletes. In late July, University of Southern California freshman guard Bronny James – son of Lakers basketball star LeBron James — collapsed from a cardiac arrest during an offseason workout. And Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin suffered an on-field cardiac arrest during a 2022 football game, following a hit to… read on > read on >

Hours plunked down in front of the TV or staring at a phone screen in childhood could bring poor heart health decades later, a new study shows. Finnish researchers say kids who were largely sedentary tended to turn into young adults who battled high cholesterol and other health troubles. “Our study shows increased sedentary time in childhood may contribute to two-thirds of the total increase in a person’s cholesterol levels before their mid-twenties,” study lead author Dr. Andrew Agbaje said in a news release from the Endocrine Society. “This suggests childhood sedentariness may be a major risk factor for elevated cholesterol and subsequent premature heart attack or stroke when individuals reach their mid-forties,” said Agbaje, who is at the University of Eastern Finland in Kuopio. His team published its findings Dec. 14 in The Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism, an Endocrine Society journal. In the study, 11-year-olds were fitted with activity trackers and were also regularly checked for cholesterol levels. Their health was then followed for 13 years. One main finding: ‘Couch potato’ kids became even more rooted to their sofas as they aged. Average sedentary time rose from 6 hours per day in childhood to 9 hours per day as they became young adults. Agbaje’s group calculate that this lack of physical activity contributed to 70% of the rise in cholesterol over the… read on > read on >

Regular exercise appears to enhance and even grow crucial areas of the human brain, new research using MRI scans shows. It’s long been known that physical activity is a brain-booster, but this international study illustrates ways this could be happening. “With comprehensive imaging scans, our study underscores the interconnected synergy between the body and the brain,” said study senior author Dr. Rajpul Attariwala, a radiologist at Prenuvo, a medical imaging center in Vancouver, Canada. Reporting recently in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease, Attariwala and colleagues analyzed more than 10,000 brain scans conducted at various Prenuvo centers. A pattern emerged: People who regularly engaged in running, walking or sports tended to have larger volumes of gray matter in their brains. Gray matter helps with the processing of incoming information, the researchers noted. These avid exercisers also tended to have larger volumes of white matter. White matter helps connect different brain regions and is crucial to memory. You didn’t have to run marathons to get a brain benefit, the team found. “We found that even moderate levels of physical activity, such as taking fewer than 4,000 steps a day, can have a positive effect on brain health,” study co-author Dr. David Merill said in a journal news release. He directs the Pacific Brain Health Center at Pacific Neuroscience Institute in Santa Monica, Calif. “This is much less… read on > read on >

Games like football, soccer and rugby come to mind when thinking about sports-related concussions. But a smashing tennis shot could cause a traumatic brain injury if the ball whacks a player’s head, a new study argues. Concussions can happen if a tennis ball traveling faster than 89 miles per hour hits someone on the head, researchers report. The average serve speed in professional tennis often exceeds 100 mph for both men and women, according to the website TennisUniverse. Amateur players can’t hit the ball nearly as hard as that, but tennis ball injuries are possible, if rare, even among amateurs, the researchers said. “Understanding and protecting against head injuries induced by tennis ball impacts is very important, given that tennis is a worldwide sport with tens of millions of participants every year,” said researcher Xin-Lin Gao, a mechanical engineering professor at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. Head injuries from a tennis ball is also more likely if the ball strikes the side of the head or if it strikes at a direct 90-degree angle, Gao and colleagues reported recently in the Journal of Applied Mechanics. The researchers came to their conclusions using a computer model similar to that which predicts head injuries that might occur in a car accident. The computer model assessed what might happen to a man’s head if hit by a tennis… read on > read on >

Exercise can boost the quality of life of women who are battling advanced breast cancer, a new study has found. Women who took part in a nine-month structured exercise program reported less fatigue and a better overall quality of life, according to results presented Thursday at the San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium. “Optimizing quality of life is, of course, important for everybody, but especially for patients living with metastatic disease who undergo continuous treatment,” said researcher Anne May, a professor at the Julius Center for Health Sciences and Primary Care at the University Medical Center, Utrecht, in the Netherlands. “By improving quality of life through enhanced symptom management, we can help patients better enjoy their personal, social, and, if applicable, working life,” May added in a meeting news release. Previous studies have found that exercise can help people with less advanced cancers, but whether those benefits also apply to patients whose cancers have spread has not been rigorously tested, May noted. For the study, May and her colleagues enrolled 357 people with advanced breast cancer, in a collaboration between institutions in Germany, Poland, Spain, Sweden, the Netherlands and Australia. All participants received a physical activity tracker and generic exercise advice. But 178 patients were also randomly selected to receive more help – twice-weekly supervised exercise sessions for nine months that involved balance, resistance and aerobic… read on > read on >

Holiday festivities bring joy to many, but they also give rise to quite a few unhealthy habits, a new survey has found. Two-thirds of people say they overindulge in food during the holidays, and nearly half (45%) said they take a break from exercise, according to a new survey from Ohio State University’s Wexner Medical Center. Meanwhile, a third admit they drink more alcohol during the holidays, and more than half report feeling tired and having less time for themselves. “Holiday travel, activities with friends and family, and trying to get a bunch of things done can cause people to lose track of their healthy habits,” said Dr. Barbara Bawer, a family medicine physician at Wexner. The survey involved 1,007 people polled between Oct. 20 and 23, with a 3.6 percentage point margin of error. Folks need to stick to their normal routine as much as possible to avoid starting unhealthy habits, Bawer said.. “Once you’re out of a routine, which typically happens around the holidays, it’s really hard to get back on track, partly because the motivation is no longer there,” Bawer said in a university news release. People should keep in mind that it’s okay to say no, whether it be for one more holiday party or one more rich dish at the buffet, Bawer said. Bawer also recommends that people: Maintain their… read on > read on >

Women who enter menopause early could be at increased risk of muscle loss in their senior years, a new study suggests. Conversely, the more extended a woman’s reproductive period, the lower the risk of declining muscle mass as measured by handgrip strength. “This study showed that a longer reproductive period and later age at menopause were linked to a lower risk of low handgrip strength in postmenopausal Korean women,” said Dr. Stephanie Faubion, medical director for The Menopause Society. “This finding may relate to the beneficial effects of estrogen on skeletal muscle,” she added in a society news release. It’s projected that by 2045 more than 70% of people over 65 will be affected by sarcopenia, a decline in muscle mass and function that occurs as part of the aging process, researchers said in background notes. A woman’s reproductive lifespan — the time between the beginning and end of her periods — is known to affect the way she ages. However, no research has focused on the relationship between sarcopenia and the reproductive period, the researchers noted. The new study evaluated more than 2,300 postmenopausal Korean women between the ages of 45 and 75, testing their handgrip strength – one of the most common ways to check for muscle loss. Researchers found that the age at menopause was associated with reduced handgrip strength, but not… read on > read on >

Doing some squats during commercial breaks or between YouTube videos can help couch potatoes keep their minds sharp, a new study suggests. Young volunteers who did short sets of squat exercises every now and then while relaxing performed better in brain games than when they simply sat around for hours, researchers report. Short bursts of exercise might help the brains of people who spend long periods on the couch or behind a desk, the study concluded. “Our half-squat intervention may be able to be used by individuals seeking to break up their sedentary behavior in an effort to preserve cognition during times, such as in the workplace,” the researchers wrote. For the study, a group of young adult volunteers participated in two scenarios: sitting without interruption for three hours; or sitting for three hours but performing a minute of half-squats every 20 minutes. In both settings, the researchers measured volunteers’ blood pressure, blood flow through the carotid artery — which accounts for 75% of total blood flow to the brain — and heart rate after 10 minutes, one hour, two hours and three hours. At the end of each trial, the volunteers completed three thinking tests. In one test, participants were asked to quickly identify if a word they were shown – “red,” “blue,” “yellow,” “green” or “black” – was printed in the same color… read on > read on >