No Seasonal Changes in Cognitive Functioning Among High School Football Athletes: Implementation of a Novel Electrophysiological Measure and Standard Clinical Measures
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVE: To evaluate neuroelectric and cognitive function relative to a season of football participation. Cognitive and neuroelectric function declines are hypothesized to be present in football athletes. DESIGN: Observational. SETTING: Athletic fields and research laboratory. PATIENTS (OR PARTICIPANTS): Seventy-seven high school athletes (15.9 + 0.9 years, 178.6 + 7.2 cm, 74.4 + 14.7 kg, and 0.8 + 0.8 self-reported concussions) participating in football (n = 46) and noncontact sports (n = 31). INTERVENTIONS (OR ASSESSMENT OF RISK FACTORS): All athletes completed preseason, midseason, and postseason assessments of cognitive and neuroelectric function, self-reported symptoms, and quality of life. All athletes participated in their respective sports without intervention, while head impact exposure in football athletes was tracked using the Head Impact Telemetry System. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: Cognitive performance was based on Cogstate computerized cognitive assessment tool processing speed, attention, learning, working memory speed, and working memory accuracy scores. ElMindA brain network activation amplitude, synchronization, timing and connectivity brain network activation scores demarcated neuroelectric performance. Quality of life was assessed on the Health Behavior Inventory and Satisfaction with Life Scale and symptoms on the SCAT3 inventory. RESULTS: Football and control sport athletes did not show declines in cognitive or neuroelectric function, quality-of-life measures, or symptom reports across a season of sport participation. CONCLUSIONS: These findings refute the notion that routine football participation places athletes at risk for acute cognitive declines. The lack of impairment may be associated with no association with head impacts and cognitive function, increased physical activity offsetting any declines, and/or test sensitivity. How these findings are associated with long-term cognitive function is unknown.
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 | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 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".