Maturity-Associated Polygenic Profiles of under 12–16-Compared to under 17–23-Year-Old Male English Academy Football Players
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The purpose of this study was to examine polygenic profiles previously associated with maturity timing in male academy football players across different age phases. Thus, 159 male football players from four English academies (U12–16, n = 86, aged 13.58 ± 1.58 years; U17–23, n = 73, aged 18.07 ± 1.69 years) and 240 male European controls were examined. Polygenic profiles comprised 39 single nucleotide polymorphisms and were analysed using unweighted and weighted total genotype scores (TGSs; TWGSs). There were significant differences in polygenic profiles between groups, whereby U17–23 players had more genetic variants associated with later maturity compared to U12–16 players (TGS, p = 0.010; TWGS, p = 0.024) and controls (TGS, p = 0.038; TWGS, p = 0.020). More specifically, U17–23 players had over two-times the odds of possessing >36 later-maturing alleles than <30 compared to U12–16 players (odds ratio (OR) = 2.84) and controls (OR = 2.08). These results suggest there was a greater proportion of relatively later-maturing players as maturation plateaus towards adulthood, which may be explained by the ‘underdog hypothesis’. This study provides the first known molecular evidence that supports the notion that a maturity selection bias exists within male academy football.
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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 | 0.000 |
| 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) | 0.000 | 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".