Impact of Head Trauma: How MMA (Mixed Martial Arts) Affects the Sense of Smell, Cognition, and Quality of Life in Fighters
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Introduction: The sense of smell plays an essential role in well-being, influencing relationships, the formation of emotional memories, and protection against toxic substances in food and the environment. Post-traumatic olfactory loss is among the leading causes of olfactory alterations, especially in contact sports like Mixed Martial Arts (MMA), which involve frequent physical trauma, particularly to the head. To date, the relationship between olfactory dysfunction and head trauma in fighters remains underexplored. Objective: To evaluate possible olfactory, gustatory, and cognitive dysfunctions in MMA fighters. Methods: Fourteen MMA fighters and 14 control participants, matched for sex and age, were recruited. The participants underwent tests to evaluate olfaction (Visual Analog Scale (VAS) and the University of Pennsylvania Smell Identification Test (UPSIT), taste (Modified Global Gustatory Test), cognition (Montreal Cognitive Assessment, MoCA) and quality of life (The 36-Item Short Form Health Survey questionnaire, SF-36). Results: A statistically significant difference was found in olfactory function between the groups (p = 0.021), with fighters having a lower mean score than the control group (fighters: 28.5 ± 4.4 vs. controls: 31.8 ± 2.4). Additionally, MMA fighters showed cognitive decline and impairment in quality of life aspects. No difference was observed in gustatory function between the groups (p = 0.508). Conclusion: The results indicate that MMA fighters exhibit impairments in olfactory function, as well as in cognition and quality of life. Further studies with larger sample sizes are needed for a more in-depth analysis of the impact of this sport on athletes' lives.
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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 | 0.001 |
| 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 | 0.001 |
| 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".