Primary Motor Cortex Excitability in Karate Athletes: A Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation Study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Purpose. Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) has been largely used to investigate adaptive changes in human motor cortex, and to understand how networks in the brain build and optimize motor programs responsible for coordination of muscle activity involved in complex motor learning. Karate represents a valuable model to investigate the effects of training on the corticospinal system excitability, because it requires a high level of coordination. The aim of this study was to examine possible changes in the resting motor threshold (rMT) and in the corticospinal response in karate athletes, and if athletes are characterized by a specific value of rMT. Methods. Twenty-fiveright-handed male karate athletes (24.9±4.9 years) and twenty-five matched non-athletes (26.2±4.5 years) were recruited. TMS was delivered over the metacarpal area of the left primary motor cortex, corresponding to the first dorsal interosseous muscle. Motor evoked potential (MEP) latencies and amplitudes at rMT, 110%, and 120% of rMT were considered. Results. Compared to non-athletes, athletes showed a lower resting motor threshold (p<0.01), shorter MEP latency (p<0.01) and higher MEP amplitude (p<0.01). Moreover, the roc curve was significant (p<0.001; sensitivity 84%, specificity 76%). Conclusions. The main finding of the present study was that there are significant differences in cortical excitability between athletes and non-athletes. Athletes’ changes in rMT and MEP values might be the result of plasticity of the motor cortex, due to sport practice which improves cortical excitability. These finding support the hypothesis that training determines specific brain organizations to meet specific sport challenges.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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".