Shear wave elastography provides reliable assessments of stiffness in the skin, fascia, and both superficial and deep muscle tissues.

Shear wave elastography (SWE) is a reliable method of estimating stiffness of superficial rectus femoris (RF) muscle at various muscle lengths. Its reliability has not been assessed in deeper muscle regions or its overlying fascia and skin tissue. 20 healthy participants completed two visits in which RF shear wave velocity (SWV) was measured twice, separated by 30mins, at four depths (skin-SKIN, fascia-FAS, superficial muscle-SUP, and deep muscle-DEEP) in three positions (relaxed-REL, neutral-NEU, and stretched-STR).

MyotonPRO Is Not Comparable to Shear Wave Elastography in the Measurement of Rectus Femoris Muscle Stiffness due to Interference of Subcutaneous Adipose Tissue.

Tissue biomechanical properties are important for optimizing musculoskeletal performance and reducing injury risk. The MyotonPRO was developed as a simple, portable, noninvasive, and highly reliable method for the estimation of muscle stiffness. It has not, however, been comprehensively validated against shear wave elastography (SWE), a validated ultrasound-based method for assessing tissue stiffness.

Creating a postgraduate syllabus for a team care diploma examination: a Delphi study.

Objectives: There is no agreed standard assessment of the minimum knowledge and skills that are required to provide healthcare to participants in individual or team sports. This study aims to develop a syllabus for the Faculty of Sport and Exercise Medicine (FSEM) Team Care Diploma examination. This will provide a recognised assessment of the minimum required skills and knowledge for healthcare professionals providing care in an individual and team sport environment.

Frontostriatal salience network expansion in individuals in depression.

Decades of neuroimaging studies have shown modest differences in brain structure and connectivity in depression, hindering mechanistic insights or the identification of risk factors for disease onset. Furthermore, whereas depression is episodic, few longitudinal neuroimaging studies exist, limiting understanding of mechanisms that drive mood-state transitions. The emerging field of precision functional mapping has used densely sampled longitudinal neuroimaging data to show behaviourally meaningful differences in brain network topography and connectivity between and in healthy individuals, but this approach has not been applied in depression.

Sport-related concussion knowledge and attitudes of staff working in English elite women's football: a survey-based study.

Background: Sport-related concussion (SRC) remains an injury of concern in sport, including football(soccer). There has been little investigation into SRC knowledge and attitudes of support staff working in the professional setting.

Methods: An amended version of the Rosenbaum Concussion Knowledge and Attitudes Survey(RoCKAS) was distributed online to coaching staff, and medical and performance staff, working at clubs in the English Football Association Women's SuperLeague (WSL) and Championship.

Strategies for motion- and respiration-robust estimation of fMRI intrinsic neural timescales.

Intrinsic neural timescales (INT) reflect the time window of neural integration within a brain region and can be measured via resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rs-fMRI). Despite the potential relevance of INT to cognition, brain organization, and neuropsychiatric illness, the influences of physiological artifacts on rs-fMRI INT have not been systematically considered. Two artifacts, head motion and respiration, pose serious issues in rs-fMRI studies.

Trajectories of remitted psychotic depression: identification of predictors of worsening by machine learning.

Background: Remitted psychotic depression (MDDPsy) has heterogeneity of outcome. The study's aims were to identify subgroups of persons with remitted MDDPsy with distinct trajectories of depression severity during continuation treatment and to detect predictors of membership to the worsening trajectory.

Method: One hundred and twenty-six persons aged 18-85 years participated in a 36-week randomized placebo-controlled trial (RCT) that examined the clinical effects of continuing olanzapine once an episode of MDDPsy had remitted with sertraline plus olanzapine.

Expansion of a frontostriatal salience network in individuals with depression.

Hundreds of neuroimaging studies spanning two decades have revealed differences in brain structure and functional connectivity in depression, but with modest effect sizes, complicating efforts to derive mechanistic pathophysiologic insights or develop biomarkers. Furthermore, although depression is a fundamentally episodic condition, few neuroimaging studies have taken a longitudinal approach, which is critical for understanding cause and effect and delineating mechanisms that drive mood state transitions over time. The emerging field of precision functional mapping using densely-sampled longitudinal neuroimaging data has revealed unexpected, functionally meaningful individual differences in brain network topology in healthy individuals, but these approaches have never been applied to individuals with depression.

A somato-cognitive action network alternates with effector regions in motor cortex.

Motor cortex (M1) has been thought to form a continuous somatotopic homunculus extending down the precentral gyrus from foot to face representations, despite evidence for concentric functional zones and maps of complex actions. Here, using precision functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) methods, we find that the classic homunculus is interrupted by regions with distinct connectivity, structure and function, alternating with effector-specific (foot, hand and mouth) areas. These inter-effector regions exhibit decreased cortical thickness and strong functional connectivity to each other, as well as to the cingulo-opercular network (CON), critical for action and physiological control, arousal, errors and pain.

Functional Connectivity Mapping for rTMS Target Selection in Depression.

Objective: Repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) protocols increasingly use subgenual anterior cingulate cortex (sgACC) functional connectivity to individualize treatment targets. However, the efficacy of this approach is unclear, with conflicting findings and varying effect sizes across studies. Here, the authors investigated the effect of the stimulation site's functional connectivity with the sgACC (sgACC-StimFC) on treatment outcome to rTMS in 295 patients with major depression.

Sport-related concussion attitudes and knowledge in elite English female footballers.

Background: Sport-related concussions (SRC) are more common and more severe in women's football than men's yet the knowledge and attitudes of SRC in the women's game are not well understood. The objective of this study was to assess the SRC knowledge and attitude in elite female footballers.

Methods: An online questionnaire was sent to all registered players in the English Football Association Women's Super League (WSL) and Championship.

Revisiting survival at sea from a nutrition and food perspective: rationalizing the rations.

This study examines the design of food rations for survival at sea required by the International Maritime Organization through the Life Saving Appliances (LSA) Code, as implemented by Transport Canada. Energy demand and body fat reserves were estimated for the Canadian population based on demographic and anthropometric data. It was determined that caloric content of food rations could be drastically decreased without potential harm to survivors of a marine abandonment.

Automated optimization of TMS coil placement for personalized functional network engagement.

Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) is used to treat multiple psychiatric and neurological conditions by manipulating activity in particular brain networks and circuits, but individual responses are highly variable. In clinical settings, TMS coil placement is typically based on either group average functional maps or scalp heuristics. Here, we found that this approach can inadvertently target different functional networks in depressed patients due to variability in their functional brain organization.

An effort-based social feedback paradigm reveals aversion to popularity in socially anxious participants and increased motivation in adolescents.

We created a novel social feedback paradigm to study how motivation for potential social links is influenced in adolescents and adults. 88 participants (42F/46M) created online posts and then expended physical effort to show their posts to other users, who varied in number of followers and probability of positive feedback. We focused on two populations of particular interest from a social feedback perspective: adolescents relative to young adults (13-17 vs 18-24 years of age), and participants with social anxiety symptoms.

Interassociation consensus recommendations for pitch-side emergency care and personal protective equipment for elite sport during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The COVID-19 pandemic has necessitated many novel responses in healthcare including sport and exercise medicine. The cessation of elite sport almost globally has had significant economic implications and resulted in pressure to resume sport in very controlled conditions. This includes protecting pitch-side medical staff and players from infection.

Rapid Precision Functional Mapping of Individuals Using Multi-Echo fMRI.

Resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is widely used in cognitive and clinical neuroscience, but long-duration scans are currently needed to reliably characterize individual differences in functional connectivity (FC) and brain network topology. In this report, we demonstrate that multi-echo fMRI can improve the reliability of FC-based measurements. In four densely sampled individual humans, just 10 min of multi-echo data yielded better test-retest reliability than 30 min of single-echo data in independent datasets.

Prevalent and sex-biased breathing patterns modify functional connectivity MRI in young adults.

Resting state functional connectivity magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is a tool for investigating human brain organization. Here we identify, visually and algorithmically, two prevalent influences on fMRI signals during 440 h of resting state scans in 440 healthy young adults, both caused by deviations from normal breathing which we term deep breaths and bursts. The two respiratory patterns have distinct influences on fMRI signals and signal covariance, distinct timescales, distinct cardiovascular correlates, and distinct tendencies to manifest by sex.

Force experienced by the head during heading is influenced more by speed than the mechanical properties of the football.

There are growing concerns about the risk of neurodegenerative diseases associated with heading in football. It is essential to understand the biomechanics of football heading to guide player protection strategies to reduce the severity of the impact. The aim of this study was to assess the effect of football speed, mass, and stiffness on the forces experienced during football heading using mathematical and human body computational model simulations.

A Critical, Event-Related Appraisal of Denoising in Resting-State fMRI Studies.

This article advances two parallel lines of argument about resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) signals, one empirical and one conceptual. The empirical line creates a four-part organization of the text: (1) head motion and respiration commonly cause distinct, major, unwanted influences (artifacts) in fMRI signals; (2) head motion and respiratory changes are, confoundingly, both related to psychological and clinical and biological variables of interest; (3) many fMRI denoising strategies fail to identify and remove one or the other kind of artifact; and (4) unremoved artifact, due to correlations of artifacts with variables of interest, renders studies susceptible to identifying variance of noninterest as variance of interest. Arising from these empirical observations is a conceptual argument: that an event-related approach to task-free scans, targeting common behaviors during scanning, enables fundamental distinctions among the kinds of signals present in the data, information which is vital to understanding the effects of denoising procedures.

Characteristics of respiratory measures in young adults scanned at rest, including systematic changes and "missed" deep breaths.

Breathing rate and depth influence the concentration of carbon dioxide in the blood, altering cerebral blood flow and thus functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) signals. Such respiratory fluctuations can have substantial influence in studies of fMRI signal covariance in subjects at rest, the so-called "resting state functional connectivity" technique. If respiration is monitored during fMRI scanning, it is typically done using a belt about the subject's abdomen to record abdominal circumference.