Participation in Elite Sport in Youth and Its Impact on Lifelong Bone Health
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Weight-bearing physical activity is considered beneficial to bone health throughout the course of life, with the most marked benefits for bone health often considered to be high levels of activity around the time of peak bone mass (PBM) acquisition. To date, the research focus has been on the benefits of recreational weight-bearing sporting activity. Participation in elite sport is associated with enhanced sporting activity but is often also associated with low body weight, menstrual disturbance in females, and rest periods following injury. The benefit of sporting activity may, therefore, be attenuated in these groups. Here, we undertook a systematic review to consider what evidence is available regarding whether elite sporting activity in young adulthood has lasting benefits for bone health. Studies of retired athletes aged >50 years, who participated in elite sport from 15 to 30 years, were considered for inclusion. Elite sport was defined as participation at the national level or above. Following protocol development, the search strategy was applied to PubMed, Medline, Embase, and Web of Science. The selection was managed with Rayyan software, and the bias was assessed using the Newcastle–Ottawa scale. Two reviewers independently identified papers; a third adjudicated and screened the final selection for consideration. The protocol was registered with PROSPERO (CRD42021293644). Two reviewers screened 951 articles, of which 4 papers met the inclusion criteria. One paper reported findings in women and three in men; no paper included both sexes. The sample sizes varied from 24 to 193 and considered football, endurance running, weightlifting, and swimming. Bone density was measured at the femoral neck, trochanter, and lumbar spine. All studies reported higher density in former athletes than non-elite controls, though the information available regarding confounding lifestyle factors was variable. A meta-analysis was not possible as studies were too heterogenous. In conclusion, from the limited available evidence, our study suggests elite sporting activity in young adulthood may have lasting benefits for bone health. However, given the paucity of available data, we highlight an urgent need for future research, especially in female athletes.
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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 | 0.001 | 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".