Diffuse white matter tract abnormalities in clinically normal ageing retired athletes with a history of sports-related concussions
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Sports-related concussions have been shown to lead to persistent subclinical anomalies of the motor and cognitive systems in young asymptomatic athletes. In advancing age, these latent alterations correlate with detectable motor and cognitive function decline. Until now, the interacting effects of concussions and the normal ageing process on white matter tract integrity remain unknown. Here we used a tract-based spatial statistical method to uncover potential white matter tissue damage in 15 retired athletes with a history of concussions, free of comorbid medical conditions. We also investigated potential associations between white matter integrity and declines in cognitive and motor functions. Compared to an age- and education-matched control group of 15 retired athletes without concussions, former athletes with concussions exhibited widespread white matter anomalies along many major association, interhemispheric, and projection tracts. Group contrasts revealed decreases in fractional anisotropy, as well as increases in mean and radial diffusivity measures in the concussed group. These differences were primarily apparent in fronto-parietal networks as well as in the frontal aspect of the corpus callosum. The white matter anomalies uncovered in concussed athletes were significantly associated with a decline in episodic memory and lateral ventricle expansion. Finally, the expected association between frontal white matter integrity and motor learning found in former non-concussed athletes was absent in concussed participants. Together, these results show that advancing age in retired athletes presenting with a history of sports-related concussions is linked to diffuse white matter abnormalities that are consistent with the effects of traumatic axonal injury and exacerbated demyelination. These changes in white matter integrity might explain the cognitive and motor function declines documented in this population.
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 machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".