Exposure to impacts across a competitive rugby season impairs balance and neuromuscular function in female rugby athletes
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Objectives We used objective assessment tools to detect subtle neurological deficits that accompany repetitive and mild head impacts in contact sport across a season. Methods Female participants (n=13, 21±1.8 years old; 167.6±6.7 cm; 72.8±6.1 kg) completed assessments pre and post the varsity rugby season. A commercial balance board was used to assess static balance and response to dynamic postural challenge. Spinal cord excitability via the soleus H-reflex was assessed in both legs. Video analysis was used to identify head impact exposures. Results A total of 172 potential concussive events were verified across 11 athletes (15.6±11; 95% CI: 6.5 to 19.8). Balance performance was worse at post-season for total centre of pressure which increased by 26% in the double stance on a stable surface (t(12)=-2.33; p=0.03; d =0.6) and by 140% in the tandem stance on a foam surface (t(12)=-3.43; p<0.01; d =0.9). Despite that, dynamic postural performance was improved after the season (p<0.01). Spinal cord excitability in rugby athletes did not change across the season but deviated from normative values at baseline. Conclusion Quantitative measures revealed that exposure to impacts across a competitive rugby season impair balance in two specific stances in female rugby athletes. Tandem-leg stance on an unstable surface and double-leg stance on firm surface are useful assessment conditions when performed over a low-cost balance board, even without clinically diagnosed concussion.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".