The anticipatory stress response to sport competition; a systematic review with meta-analysis of cortisol reactivity

Objective: Athletes anticipating sport competition regularly experience distinct emotional and physiological responses as a result of the expected psychosocial and physical stress. Specifically, cortisol, an indicator of hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis activation, prepares the athlete for the psychological and physiological demands of competition. The objective of this meta-analysis is to analyse the magnitude of the anticipatory cortisol response in athletes preparing to participate in sport competition and to examine the influence of gender, level of competition and data collection time. Design: Systematic review with meta-analysis. Data sources: Four electronic databases were searched to March 2017: PubMed, PsycINFO, SPORTDiscus and Scopus. Eligibility criteria for selecting studies: (1) Athletes participating in real sport competition;(2) salivary cortisol concentration collected before competition in addition to baseline sample(s);(3) original research article published in English language. Results: Data from 25 studies provided 27 effect sizes. A significant anticipatory cortisol response of g=0.85, p<0.001 was identified. Males had a stronger trend for greater cortisol reactivity (g=1.07) than females (g=0.56, p=0.07). Females and athletes competing at international level did not demonstrate a significant anticipatory stress response. There were no significant differences between level of competition, type of sport or time of competition. Meta-regression indicated that the anticipatory cortisol response is greater when assessed closer to the start of competition (Q=6.85, p=0.009). Summary/conclusion: The anticipatory cortisol response before sport competition reflects moderate cortisol reactivity that prepares athletes optimally for the demands of sport competition via the influence on cognitive processes and attentional control. However, both female athletes and international competitors did not demonstrate a significant anticipatory cortisol response, possibly due to differences in appraisal of the stress of sport competition

A community-based validation study of the short-form 36 version 2 philippines (tagalog) in two cities in the philippines

10.1371/journal.pone.0083794PLoS ONE812-POLN

Caspase activation precedes and leads to tangles

Studies of post-mortem tissue have shown that the location of fibrillar tau deposits, called neurofibrillary tangles (NFT), matches closely with regions of massive neuronal death(1,2), severe cytological abnormalities(3), and markers of caspase activation and apoptosis(4–6), leading to the idea that tangles cause neurodegeneration in Alzheimer’s disease and tau-related frontotemporal dementia. However, using in vivo multiphoton imaging to observe tangles and activation of executioner caspases in living tau transgenic mice (Tg4510 strain), we find the opposite: caspase activation occurs first, and precedes tangle formation by hours to days. New tangles form within a day. After a new tangle forms, the neuron remains alive and caspase activity seems to be suppressed. Similarly, introduction of wild-type 4-repeat tau (Tau-4R) into wild-type animals triggered caspase activation, tau truncation and tau aggregation. Adeno-associated virus-mediated expression of a construct mimicking caspase-cleaved tau into wild-type mice led to the appearance of intracellular aggregates, tangle-related conformational- and phospho-epitopes, and the recruitment of full-length endogenous tau to the aggregates. On the basis of these data, we propose a new model in which caspase activation cleaves tau to initiate tangle formation, then truncated tau recruits normal tau to misfold and form tangles. Because tangle-bearing neurons are long-lived, we suggest that tangles are ‘off pathway’ to acute neuronal death. Soluble tau species, rather than fibrillar tau, may be the critical toxic moiety underlying neurodegeneration

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency–Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research

Evaluation psychophysiologique du stress en situation de compétition chez des footballeurs professionnels

ORSAY-PARIS11-Bib. STAPS (914712103) / SudocSudocFranceF

Non-Aligned Utopias: Lecture and Panel

Presented on October 9, 2019 at 6:00 p.m. in the Bill Moore Student Success Center, Clary Theater.It is this rise of African art on a vast global scale that brought the Sengalese-French artist and curator Oulimata Gueye to Tech’s campus to participate in a round table discussion hosted by the French Club at Tech as well as the French department within the School of Modern Languages. Gueye’s work currently focuses on the impact of digital technology on urban popular culture and Africa. Her research is based on science fiction products like literature, film and video games which reveal the emergence of art from Africa as it enters into the global stage.Susana M. Morris is a scholar of Black Feminism, Black Digital Media, and Afrofuturism. She is an Associate Professor in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at Georgia Tech.Subha Xavier is an Associate Professor of French at Emory University.Gladys M. Francis is an Associate Professor of French and Francophone Studies at Georgia State University. Her research involves French and Francophone Studies; Theory and cultural Studies, Africana Studies; Postcolonial Studies; Visual and Media Studies; Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. She explores issues of identify formation, (rural/urban) resilience, race and ethnicity, gender-based violence, individual and collective trauma and social cohesion – in France, the French Caribbean, and Sub-Saharan Africa.Alix Pierre is Director of Cultural Orientation and Lecturer in World Languages & Literature and African Diaspora and the World at Spelman College.Samba Sy is a Lecturer of French in the School of Modern Languages at Georgia Tech.Runtime: 99:47 minutesNew technologies and the soaring accessibility of media production in recent decades have allowed African countries to challenge their place on the cultural world scene. Critic and curator Oulimata Gueye’s research focuses on the impact of digital technology on urban popular culture in Africa, and on the imaginary worlds it produces. The round table will center on Oulimata Gueye’s project Non-Aligned Utopias with scholars working on Afrofuturism and African history, media and expression, such as Dr. Susanna Morris (Georgia Tech), Dr. Subha Xavier (Emory University), Dr. Gladys Francis (Georgia State University), Dr. Alix Pierre (Spelman College) and Samba Sy (Georgia Tech). This event is co-organized by the Cultural services of the French Embassy in the United States and the School of Modern Languages and the School of Literature, Media,and Communication at Georgia Tech