Scientists who have been investigating the link between professional football and severe brain damage have a troubling new piece of evidence: The brain of a deceased man who stopped playing football after college also showed the distinctive signs of damage. The man, the former Western Illinois wide receiver Mike Borich, died at 42 of a drug overdose in February after a downward spiral of depression and substance abuse that is generally associated with the type of tissue damage found in his brain [The New York Times].
The findings suggest that the damage isn’t only associated with professional football players who have played at the highest level of competition for years, but might be a fundamental byproduct of the sport itself. The cumulative effect of the many blows to the head that many football players experience may simply be too much for the brain to handle, researchers say.
Several neuroscientists have been investigating football players with a condition called chronic traumatic encephalopathy (C.T.E.). Scientific progress is slow because the condition can only be diagnosed after death, when the brains donated by players can be sliced, stained, and examined for protein deposits and fibrous tangles. So far, researchers have identified C.T.E. in eight NFL players who died between the ages of 36 and 52–many of whom had extreme emotional problems in their last years. It has been found in every player of those ages examined by the two groups doing such research [The New York Times].
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Trouble is mounting for the South African athlete who was suspected of having an unfair advantage in women’s track events because of male characteristics. After 18-year-old Caster Semenya thumped the competition at an 800-meter race in Berlin, sports officials announced that Semenya would be subjected to a battery of tests to determine her gender. Now, unconfirmed sources have reported that the tests showed Semenya has both female and male reproductive organs, and her future in women’s sports is in doubt.
Newspapers in Australia reported that while Semenya’s external genitalia is female, she doesn’t have ovaries and instead has internal testes that produce the hormone testosterone. If the reports are accurate, Semenya probably benefited from that hormone boost by gaining muscle mass. But it now seems clear that there is no disciplinary action to be taken, because even if Semenya has high male hormone levels, it is not because of medical cheating. But that leaves a moral and ethical quandary and a medical issue which anyone else in the same position would be able to work out in private – for Semenya, it is all public [ABC Sport].
Experts says that based on the information reported, Semenya may have a condition called androgen insensitivity syndrome, in which the fetus develops functional testes, but then stops developing male characteristics. As a result, the baby develops down the “default” female route. The testes are there but usually do not descend and remain hidden in the body and the condition does not become apparent until adolescence when the girl does not start her period [BBC News]. Medical experts also note that internal testes can grow malignant tumors, and say that some doctors advise removing them as a precautionary measure.
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When 18-year-old Caster Semenya blew past the competition in the women’s 800-meter race at the World Athletics Championships in Berlin this week, she got more than a gold medal. The South African athlete ran straight into a controversy about both the nature of gender and hers in particular. Some other runners contend that Semenya, with her stereotypically masculine build, is really a man, while the more temperate governing body, the International Association of Athletic Federations, says it needs to determine if she has male characteristics that give her an unfair advantage. To settle the question, the IAAF has ordered tests by a gynecologist, an endocrinologist, a gender expert, and a psychologist.
Gender expert Richard Auchus says assigning sex was hardly as easy as sizing someone up visually…. “For 99 percent of the population it’s easy to determine…. But one percent of the population have conditions that make it not so straightforward” [The New York Times]. In the 1960s, athletic federations began testing athletes by scraping cells from their mouths and testing them for a pair of X chromosomes, which typically establishes a person’s sex as female (as opposed to the XY chromosomes typically carried by males). But the tests were halted in the 1990s as critics pointed out that there are medical conditions that lead individuals with two X chromosomes to develop masculine characteristics, and others that mean individuals with one X and one Y chromosome never develop masculine characteristics. Some other individuals also exist outside the usual sexes of XX females and XY males; these may include males who are XXY, further confusing the tests [Nature News].
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Young baseball players in Latin America with big dreams of coming to the United States to play in the big leagues have to do more than work on their batting and fielding these days–they may also have to prove that they are who they say they are. Baseball has been beset by a series of assumed identity scandals; for example, the young baseball phenom, Esmailyn Gonzalez, received a $1.4-million bonus when he signed with the Washington Nationals in 2006. This February, the player who was misrepresenting himself as only 19 years old turned out to be a 23-year-old by the name of Carlos David Alvarez Lugo [Scientific American].
To combat the problem, Major League Baseball investigators have begun giving DNA tests to some prospects to determine whether they are actually related to the people they identify as their parents, and aren’t just borrowing them along with the birth certificate of a younger man. A statement from Major League Baseball said that it used DNA testing in the Dominican Republic “in very rare instances and only on a consensual basis to deal with the identity fraud problem that the league faces in that country.” The statement added that the results of the tests were not used for any other purpose [The New York Times]. But the testing raises ethical questions, and could even be declared illegal when a new law takes effect later this year.
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In the past century, jockeys have helped their horses race about six percent faster, thanks to a position on the horse known as the “monkey crouch.” This elevated, squatting stance minimizes the work the horse must do to propel his rider forward, according to a study published in Science.
To analyze the movement of the horse and jockey while racing, scientists attached sensors to the saddle and the jockey’s belt. They found that when a horse runs, it also moves up and down, bringing the jockey along with it. The rider can therefore weigh the horse down or, in the case of the monkey crouch, he can isolate himself from the horse’s motions, and therefore minimize his effect on the horse’s movement. When seated upright, riders act much like sandbags, weighing down the horse and incurring increased mechanical and metabolic costs. But in the crouched … position, a jockey can move relative to the horse and minimize this forward-backward and up-and-down movement [Scientific American].
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Unscrupulous athletes may soon find it much harder to get away with juicing. Anti-doping agencies are trying out “biological passports,” electronic records for individual athletes which provide baseline measurements of substances in their blood and urine. The record is built up over time through repeated sampling, and later tests can look for suspicious changes that may indicate the use of performance enhancing substances. As cycling has been particularly hammered by allegations of doping athletes, the International Cycling Agency has lead the charge on biological passports. Over a year, it took around 8300 blood samples from 804 cyclists. It recently revealed that a small number of these athletes’ profiles are “under further scrutiny” [New Scientist].
Doping has gone far beyond obvious substances like steroids; in recent years athletes have been caught injecting hormones for a competitive edge, and even getting transfusions of their own blood to discreetly boost their red blood cell counts. The biological passport would combat this increasingly sophisticated arsenal of tricks. Rather than ordinary spot-testing approaches, which look for unnatural ratios between biological constituents in a single sample or for direct chemical evidence of known doping agents, the passport allows investigators to see the big picture—any deviations from the rider’s test-established norm that might result from doping, even if the specific drug or tactic remains unknown [Scientific American].
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The regular collisions and concussions that take place on the football field may have a cumulative effect on the players’ brains, according to several new studies. In one small study, researchers found that just a few concussions can have an impact on cognitive skills 30 years later, while the other, more dramatic study found that a deceased NFL player was suffering from a severe degenerative brain disease. Taken together, the studies add to the mounting evidence that repeated blows to the head in football games lead to debilitating later-life afflictions such as dementia [Washington Post].
The biopsy of the NFL lineman Tom McHale, who played from 1987 to 1995 and who died last May at the age of 45, was announced at a press conference timed to coincide with the preparations for the Super Bowl this Sunday. The biopsy showed that McHale was suffering from chronic traumatic encephalopathy, researchers said. Known as C.T.E., the progressive condition results from repetitive head trauma and can bring on dementia in people in their 40s or 50s. Using techniques that can be administered only after a patient has died, doctors have identified C.T.E. in all six N.F.L. veterans between ages 36 and 50 who have been tested for the condition, further evidence of the dangers of improperly treated brain trauma in football [The New York Times].
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Tennis referees are far more likely to make wrong “out” calls than wrong “in” calls, according to a new study. A quirk of our visual perception system, which helps us anticipate the motion of an object, seems to bias our perception of where a speeding tennis ball stops moving. “This is not a problem with referees,” says study co-author David Whitney…. “It’s a consequence of human visual processing … a visual illusion caused by a mechanism that allows the system to localize a moving object” [Scientific American].
The idea to study this visual illusion in a real-world context came to Whitney during a Wimbledon match as he watched a player challenge and overturn a referee’s call. For the study, published in Current Biology [subscription required], the researchers used Hawk-Eye technology, a system of high-speed cameras that is often used for contested calls in tennis matches. Three scientists independently reviewed video and instant replay of 4,457 randomly selected points from the 2007 Wimbledon championships. Of the 83 calls that the video and instant replay showed were wrong, 70 were “out” calls [Scientific American]. Without the visual bias, there should have been the same number of wrong “out” calls as “in” calls.
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In the first major doping scandal of the Beijing Olympics, a North Korean pistol shooter has been stripped of his silver and bronze medals after testing positive for the drug propranolol. The drug, which belongs to a class called beta-blockers, would not be considered a performance-enhancing drug in most sports; it works by blocking the action of adrenaline, and therefore lowers blood pressure and heart rate.
Cardiologist Sandeep Jauhar explains that while propranolol is used to treat high blood pressure, it has additional uses: “It’s also used to treat other conditions that are mediated by high adrenaline levels, such as tremor and performance anxiety. Beta blockers don’t lower the anxiety level, but they lower manifestations of the anxiety, such as fast heart rate, sweating, and tremor” [Scientific American]. Anti-doping officials from the International Olympic Committee (IOC) believe that the shooter, Kim Jong Su, used the drug to keep his hands from shaking during the competition.
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Despite the International Olympic Committee’s vow to vigilantly test for performance enhancing drugs at the Summer Olympics in Beijing, some scientists and sports doctors say that athletes are likely to cheat at the games, and get away with it.
The focus is on erythropoietin (EPO), a hormone naturally produced by the kidneys which regulates red blood cell production. When extra EPO is injected before a competition, it boosts performance by increasing the amount of red blood cells in an athlete’s body; those blood cells then carry more oxygen to the hard-working muscles.
Anti-doping agencies regularly test athletes for EPO, but some researchers say the agencies can’t develop tests fast enough to keep up with new “copycat” versions of EPO, often produced by pharmaceutical companies in India, Cuba, and China. These cheap versions of EPO, often called biosimilars, can be easily bought over the internet…. Some scientists who track and monitor the development of copycat EPO drugs say there could be up to 80 different versions now being manufactured in different parts of the world [BBC News].
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With less than a month to go before the opening ceremony for the summer Olympics in Beijing, athletes are still worrying about what effect the city’s famously polluted air will have on their performances. Doctors say that endurance athletes, such as marathon runners and long-distance cyclers, will be most at risk if they compete on smoggy days.
“Marathon runners take about 40 to 50 breaths per minute and there is a real need for oxygen to be transported to the muscles. In normal conditions oxygen makes up about 21% of the air, if that’s compromised, because the very complex transport process in the lungs is compromised, there will be less oxygen getting to the muscles. Add in the heat and the humidity and there could be some major implications,” says [sports doctor John] Brewer [BBC News].
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