The effect of a seven-week exercise program on golf swing performance and musculoskeletal measures

As most golf exercise studies have shown improved golf performance as a result of two or three sessions per week, the present study investigated the effects of a supervised exercise session performed once a week for seven weeks on golf swing variables and musculoskeletal screening measures. Professional Golfers Association of Australia International Golf Institute student golfers (n ¼ 43) with a mean standard deviation handicap of 8.6 8.3 participated in the study. Each golfer performed 10 musculoskeletal tests and a standardised 60-shot golf performance test (TrackMan, Vedbaek, Denmark) on separate days before and after the seven-week program. Significant improvements in a number of musculoskeletal tests (i.e. left leg bridging (6.6%), thoracic extension (62.5%), right thoracic rotation (23.3%), and right (20.8%) and left single leg squat (29.1%)) were observed (all p 0.024); however, no significant differences were observed for any golf swing variables. Future research investigating different training protocols may help to determine whether the type or frequency of training has the greatest influence on golf swing performance

Generic Subsequence Matching Framework: Modularity, Flexibility, Efficiency

Subsequence matching has appeared to be an ideal approach for solving many problems related to the fields of data mining and similarity retrieval. It has been shown that almost any data class (audio, image, biometrics, signals) is or can be represented by some kind of time series or string of symbols, which can be seen as an input for various subsequence matching approaches. The variety of data types, specific tasks and their partial or full solutions is so wide that the choice, implementation and parametrization of a suitable solution for a given task might be complicated and time-consuming; a possibly fruitful combination of fragments from different research areas may not be obvious nor easy to realize. The leading authors of this field also mention the implementation bias that makes difficult a proper comparison of competing approaches. Therefore we present a new generic Subsequence Matching Framework (SMF) that tries to overcome the aforementioned problems by a uniform frame that simplifies and speeds up the design, development and evaluation of subsequence matching related systems. We identify several relatively separate subtasks solved differently over the literature and SMF enables to combine them in straightforward manner achieving new quality and efficiency. This framework can be used in many application domains and its components can be reused effectively. Its strictly modular architecture and openness enables also involvement of efficient solutions from different fields, for instance efficient metric-based indexes. This is an extended version of a paper published on DEXA 2012.Comment: This is an extended version of a paper published on DEXA 201

Statistical issues related to dietary intake as the response variable in intervention trials.

The focus of this paper is dietary intervention trials. We explore the statistical issues involved when the response variable, intake of a food or nutrient, is based on self-report data that are subject to inherent measurement error. There has been little work on handling error in this context. A particular feature of self-reported dietary intake data is that the error may be differential by intervention group. Measurement error methods require information on the nature of the errors in the self-report data. We assume that there is a calibration sub-study in which unbiased biomarker data are available. We outline methods for handling measurement error in this setting and use theory and simulations to investigate how self-report and biomarker data may be combined to estimate the intervention effect. Methods are illustrated using data from the Trial of Nonpharmacologic Intervention in the Elderly, in which the intervention was a sodium-lowering diet and the response was sodium intake. Simulations are used to investigate the methods under differential error, differing reliability of self-reports relative to biomarkers and different proportions of individuals in the calibration sub-study. When the reliability of self-report measurements is comparable with that of the biomarker, it is advantageous to use the self-report data in addition to the biomarker to estimate the intervention effect. If, however, the reliability of the self-report data is low compared with that in the biomarker, then, there is little to be gained by using the self-report data. Our findings have important implications for the design of dietary intervention trials. © 2016 The Authors. Statistics in Medicine published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd

Interlaboratory Investigation on the CEA Assay (Roche) with Column Filtration, Dialysis and Ultrafiltration Techniques

Peer Reviewe

The epidemiology of injuries across the weight-training sports

Background: Weight-training sports, including weightlifting, powerlifting, bodybuilding, strongman, Highland Games, and CrossFit, are weight-training sports that have separate divisions for males and females of a variety of ages, competitive standards, and bodyweight classes. These sports may be considered dangerous because of the heavy loads commonly used in training and competition. Objectives: Our objective was to systematically review the injury epidemiology of these weight-training sports, and, where possible, gain some insight into whether this may be affected by age, sex, competitive standard, and bodyweight class. Methods: We performed an electronic search using PubMed, SPORTDiscus, CINAHL, and Embase for injury epidemiology studies involving competitive athletes in these weight-training sports. Eligible studies included peer-reviewed journal articles only, with no limit placed on date or language of publication. We assessed the risk of bias in all studies using an adaption of the musculoskeletal injury review method. Results: Only five of the 20 eligible studies had a risk of bias score ≥75 %, meaning the risk of bias in these five studies was considered low. While 14 of the studies had sample sizes >100 participants, only four studies utilized a prospective design. Bodybuilding had the lowest injury rates (0.12–0.7 injuries per lifter per year; 0.24–1 injury per 1000 h), with strongman (4.5–6.1 injuries per 1000 h) and Highland Games (7.5 injuries per 1000 h) reporting the highest rates. The shoulder, lower back, knee, elbow, and wrist/hand were generally the most commonly injured anatomical locations; strains, tendinitis, and sprains were the most common injury type. Very few significant differences in any of the injury outcomes were observed as a function of age, sex, competitive standard, or bodyweight class. Conclusion: While the majority of the research we reviewed utilized retrospective designs, the weight-training sports appear to have relatively low rates of injury compared with common team sports. Future weight-training sport injury epidemiology research needs to be improved, particularly in terms of the use of prospective designs, diagnosis of injury, and changes in risk exposure

Frequency of rare recessive mutations in unexplained late onset cerebellar ataxia.

Sporadic late onset cerebellar ataxia is a well-described clinical presentation with a broad differential diagnosis that adult neurologists should be familiar with. However, despite extensive clinical investigations, an acquired cause is identified in only a minority of cases. Thereafter, an underlying genetic basis is often considered, even in those without a family history. Here we apply whole exome sequencing to a cohort of 12 patients with late onset cerebellar ataxia. We show that 33% of 'idiopathic' cases harbor compound heterozygous mutations in known ataxia genes, including genes not included on multi-gene panels, or primarily associated with an ataxic presentation

A Heuristic Based on the Intrinsic Dimensionality for Reducing the Number of Cyclic DTW Comparisons in Shape Classification and Retrieval Using AESA

Cyclic Dynamic Time Warping (CDTW) is a good dissimilarity of shape descriptors of high dimensionality based on contours, but it is computationally expensive. For this reason, to perform recognition tasks, a method to reduce the number of comparisons and avoid an exhaustive search is convenient. The Approximate and Eliminate Search Algorithm (AESA) is a relevant indexing method because of its drastic reduction of comparisons, however, this algorithm requires a metric distance and that is not the case of CDTW. In this paper, we introduce a heuristic based on the intrinsic dimensionality that allows to use CDTW and AESA together in classification and retrieval tasks over these shape descriptors. Experimental results show that, for descriptors of high dimensionality, our proposal is optimal in practice and significantly outperforms an exhaustive search, which is the only alternative for them and CDTW in these tasks

CE16008

The WESPAS survey program is the consolidation of two existing survey programs carried out by FEAS. The Main Shelf herring acoustic survey has been carried out annually since 2008 and reports on the annual abundance of summer feeding aggregations of herring to the west of Scotland and north of Ireland from 54N to 59N. The boarfish survey has been carried out since 2011using a chartered fishing vessel and reports on the abundance of spawning aggregations of boarfish 47N to 57N. In 2016 both surveys were combined and carried out onboard the RV Celtic Explorer over a 42 day period providing synoptic coverage of shelf waters from 59N southwards to 47N