Associations Between Instrumented Mouthguard-Measured Head Acceleration Events and Post-Match Biomarkers of Astroglial and Axonal Injury in Male Amateur Australian Football Players
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Advances in instrumented mouthguards (iMGs) allow for accurate quantification of single high-acceleration head impacts and cumulative head acceleration exposure in collision sports. However, relationships between these measures and risk of brain cell injury remain unclear. AIM: The purpose of this study was to quantify measures of non-concussive head impact exposure and assess their association with blood glial fibrillary acidic protein (GFAP), neurofilament light (NfL) and phosphorylated-tau-181 (p-tau-181) levels in male Australian football players. METHODS: A total of 31 athletes underwent in-season (24 h post-match) and post-season (> 5 weeks) blood collections and/or wore HITIQ Nexus A9 iMGs measuring peak linear (PLA) and rotational (PRA) acceleration. Match footage was used to verify and code impacts. Blood GFAP, NfL, and p-tau-181 were quantified using Simoa and natural log transformed for analysis. Associations between post-match biomarkers and within match maximum single impact and cumulative PLA/PRA were assessed with linear mixed models. RESULTS: In-season versus post-season elevations were found for GFAP (mean difference 0.14, 95% CI 0.01-0.26, p = 0.033), NfL (mean difference = 0.21, 95% CI 0.09-0.32, p = 0.001) and p-tau-181 (mean difference = 0.49, 95% CI 0.33-0.65, p < 0.001). Post-match GFAP was associated with maximum single impact PLA (B = 0.003, 95% CI 0.0002-0.005, p = 0.036), cumulative PLA (B = 0.001, 95% CI 0.0002-0.002, p = 0.017), cumulative PRA (B = 0.01, 95% CI 0.002-0.02, p = 0.014), and impact number (B = 0.03, 95% CI 0.003-0.05, p = 0.029) within a single match. Change in NfL levels between two-matches correlated with cumulative PLA (r = 0.80, 95% CI 0.38-0.95, p = 0.005), PRA (r = 0.71, 95% CI 0.19-0.92, p = 0.019) and impact number (r = 0.63, 95% CI 0.05-0.89, p = 0.038). CONCLUSION: Maximum and cumulative head accelerations in Australian football, measured by iMGs, were associated with elevated blood biomarkers of brain injury, highlighting the potential of both technologies for head impact management in collision sports.
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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) | 0.001 | 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".