Autonomic Function and Exercise Performance in Elite Athletes with Cervical Spinal Cord Injury
Bibliographic record
Abstract
INTRODUCTION: "Complete" cervical spinal cord injury (SCI) is commonly believed to cause the decentralization of spinal sympathetic circuits and a consequent inability to meet the hemodynamic demands of exercise. Recently, however, we have noticed that athletes with motor complete cervical SCI exhibit an exercise-induced tachycardia that appears to be at odds with the known effects of sympathetic decentralization. PURPOSE: This study aimed to determine the physiological basis of this response and, in doing so, to investigate associations between autonomic function, International Wheelchair Rugby Federation (IWRF) classification, and indices of exercise performance in highly trained athletes. METHODS: Seven Paralympic wheelchair rugby players with motor complete cervical SCI were firstly classified according to IWRF classification, then assessed for autonomic function (sympathetic skin response [SSR]) and cardiovascular function (systolic blood pressure in response to sit-up tilt). Next, HRpeak and distance covered during a field-based maximal 4-min push were measured. Finally, peak oxygen uptake (VO2peak) and HRpeak during laboratory-based maximal incremental arm-crank exercise were measured. RESULTS: All athletes demonstrated intact SSR (2.7 ± 1.2 responses from five stimulations), little or no change in systolic blood pressure in response to sit-up tilt (-22 ± 16 mm Hg), and exercise-induced tachycardia (HRpeak = 152 ± 20 bpm). SSR was significantly correlated with HRpeak in the field, 4-min push distance, and VO2peak (all ρ ≥ 0.946), whereas current IWRF classification was not. CONCLUSIONS: All participants exhibited partial preservation of descending sympathetic control. We also found that the degree of remaining SSR, but not IWRF classification, was strongly correlated with indices of exercise performance. The findings suggest that the degree of remaining sympathetic control is an important determinant of exercise performance in athletes with cervical SCI.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".