Investigating Persistent Sympathovagal Dysregulation Following a Complex Dual Task in Concussed Athletes
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND/OBJECTIVES: Dual tasks are increasingly being employed in research on concussion, since they provide a somewhat more realistic representation of the demands athletes face on the field. While single cognitive and motor tasks have revealed persisting autonomic alterations in concussed athletes, the unique autonomic response required by a dual task remains unexplored in this population. The purpose of this study was to evaluate autonomic responses in asymptomatic athletes with a history of concussion (m = 5.46 months ± 2.00) following a complex dual task. METHODS: Heart rate variability (HRV), a biomarker of autonomic regulation, was measured in 34 athletes (16 concussed, 18 controls) aged 17 to 24. HRV data were collected using the Polar H10 chest belt. Five-minute segments were extracted under four conditions: rest, following a cognitive task (switch task), after a dual task combining both motor and cognitive components, and after the same dual task preceded by 20 min of aerobic exercise. A series of 4 × 2 mixed-design ANOVAs were conducted to assess the differences between the conditions and groups. RESULTS: = 0.014) only in concussed participants. These results suggest that the switch task may stimulate frontal regions and promote a parasympathetic response, as reflected by the rise in HRV. Notably, the effect of the switch task disappeared when combined with the motor component of the dual task, whether it was preceded by aerobic exercise or not. CONCLUSIONS: The dual task results indicate potential competing mechanisms between the motor and cognitive components of the task, which future studies using similar protocols should consider. Meanwhile, the switch task appears sufficiently demanding to reveal autonomic alterations, which, when measured through HRV, may constitute a relevant clinical tool for assessing athletes' readiness to return to sport and academic study.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 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".