Pre-Season Fitness Not a Factor in Collegiate Sports Injury Risk

HealthDay – 1 hr 40 mins ago MONDAY, July 23 (HealthDay News) -- Levels of pre-season fitness do not predict how quickly college athletes may be injured during the season, but their gender and the type of sport they play do, a new study indicates.

Canadian researchers assessed pre-season fitness among athletes on six varsity teams and found that women had a shorter time to injury than men. Certain sports, such as volleyball, also had a much shorter time to injury than other sports, including hockey and basketball.

The pre-participation fitness tests given to the athletes in the study included a vertical jump test to assess anaerobic power, and measurements of lower body strength, lower back and hip flexibility, agility, upper body strength, core strength and flexibility, and shoulder flexibility.

More than two-thirds of the athletes suffered an injury during their seasons, with muscle or tendon strains in the legs or feet being most common. While 55 percent of the athletes missed at least one practice due to injury, most did not miss any games. About 40 percent of the injuries occurred during pre-season practice, the study found.

On average, female athletes suffered their first injury about 40 percent of the way through the season, compared with 66 percent of the way through the season for male athletes, the University of Alberta researchers reported.

Injuries occurred sooner in volleyball than in any other sport -- less than 20 percent of the way through the season for women and 35 percent of the way through the season for men.

The safest sport was men's hockey, according to the findings, with first injuries occurring an average of three-quarters of the way through the season.

Pre-season fitness had no overall effect on athletes' time to injury during their season, concluded the study published online in the journal Sports Medicine, Arthroscopy, Rehabilitation, Therapy & Technology.

"The only association we found between pre-season fitness and injury was that

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In utero exposure to diesel exhaust a possible risk factor for obesity

ScienceDaily (July 19, 2012) — Pregnant mice exposed to high levels of air pollution gave birth to offspring with a significantly higher rate of obesity and insulin resistance in adulthood than those that were not exposed to air pollution. This effect seemed especially prevalent in male mice, which were heavier regardless of diet. These findings, published online in the FASEB Journal, suggests a link between diesel exhaust exposure in utero and bulging waistlines in adulthood.

See Also:Health & MedicineDiet and Weight LossObesityPlants & AnimalsMiceExtreme SurvivalEarth & ClimateAir PollutionPollutionReferenceSouth Beach dietSaturated fatZone dietNutrition and pregnancy

"It is becoming clearer that our environment profoundly affects our health in ways that are little understood," said Jessica L. Bolton, Ph.D., a researcher involved in the work from the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience at Duke University in Durham, NC. "We believe these data have important implications for health disparities as a consequence of socioeconomic conditions, in which low income neighborhoods tend to be disproportionately exposed to high levels of pollution, which we hope will inform policy and regulation decisions."

To make this discovery, Bolton and colleagues used two groups of pregnant female mice, one of which was exposed to diesel exhaust during the latter half of pregnancy. The second group was exposed to filtered air for the same time period. The mice lived in specialized chambers for four hours each day breathing polluted air and then were returned to normal housing after these exposures. Prior to birth, some of the fetal brains of the mice from both groups were analyzed to measure immune proteins and to get a "snap shot" of the fetal brain immune response to the in utero condition. Once the offspring were adults, they were placed on either a low-fat diet (10% saturated fat) or a high-fat diet (45% saturated fat). All other nutritional aspects of the diets were identical.

Scientists measured food intake, body weight and activity levels before putting the mice on their diets, and then weekly throughout the experiment. At the end of six weeks, metabolic hormones were assessed. They found that males from diesel-exposed moms were heavier than the males from clean air-exposed moms regardless of their diet as adults. In contrast, females from diesel-exposed moms were heavier than control females only if they were fed a high-fat diet as adults, and they never developed signs of insulin resistance.

"If you're pregnant and have a long drive into work, you might think twice about opening the car windows," said Gerald Weissmann, M.D., Editor-in-Chief of the FASEB Journal. "It's already been established that risk factors for obesity (junk food, high fat-high cholesterol diets, etc.) begin as early as the womb. This important study shows that the air a mother breathes is also one of those risk factors."

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