Years of play alter MRI measures of brain health in former Canadian Football League athletes: a pilot study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Introduction: Concussive and sub-concussive blows are commonly sustained during contact sports. Through a detailed neuroimaging analysis, this pilot study aimed to determine if a history of sport-related concussions exacerbated cognitive decline later in life. It was hypothesized that clinical health assessments and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) techniques would provide insight into lasting health and well-being, structural, microstructural, and functional alterations caused by a history of concussive injuries. Materials and Methods: Twenty aging, retired Canadian Football League (rCFL) players (aged 56.9 ± 6.9) had clinical testing and MRI data acquired. Cortical thickness, voxel-wise diffusion tensor imaging (DTI), and Default Mode Network (DMN) connectivity data was collected for each subject and compared against healthy controls. Retired athlete age, playing position, and career length were also examined. Results: This study found widespread cortical thinning, significantly increased mean diffusivity, increased axial diffusivity, and both hyperactivity and hypoactivity within the DMN. Athlete age, position, and career length all influenced microstructural integrity. On average, retired athletes scored about 4 times greater depression-like and concussion-related symptoms and scored significantly lower in all health categories compared to healthy controls. Conclusions: These findings suggested that lasting signs of neurological injuries were present years after retiring from professional play.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| 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".