Prioritise safety, optimise success! Return to rugby postpartum

Pregnancy and childbirth involve substantial physical, physiological and psychological changes. As such, postpartum rugby players should be supported and appropriately prepared to return to the demands of rugby alongside the additional demands of motherhood. This review aims to discuss specific perinatal considerations that inform a rugby player's readiness to return-to-sport postpartum and present an approach to rehabilitation. Before engaging in full rugby training and matchplay, postpartum players should have progressed through the initial phases of rehabilitation and graded sports-specific training to prepare them for the loads they will be exposed to. Additional rehabilitation considerations include minimising deconditioning during pregnancy; medical concerns; the abdominal wall; the pelvic floor; perinatal breast changes, breastfeeding and risk of contact breast injury; body mass; nutritional requirements; hormonal considerations; athlete identity and psychological considerations; joining team training; return to contact and tackle training; evaluating player load tolerance and future research, policy and surveillance needs. A whole-systems, biopsychosocial approach following an evidence informed return-to-sport framework is recommended when rehabilitating postpartum rugby players. Health and exercise professionals are encouraged to use the perinatal-specific recommendations in this review to guide the development of postpartum rehabilitation protocols and resources

No observed effect of homologous recombination on influenza C virus evolution

The occurrence of homologous recombination in influenza viruses has been under some debate recently. To determine the extent of homologous recombination in influenza C virus, recombination analyses of all available gene sequences of influenza C virus were carried out. No recombination signal was found. With the previous evidence in influenza A and B viruses, it seems that homologous recombination has minimal or no effect on influenza virus evolution

Implementation of routine outcome measurement in child and adolescent mental health services in the United Kingdom: a critical perspective

The aim of this commentary is to provide an overview of clinical outcome measures that are currently recommended for use in UK Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS), focusing on measures that are applicable across a wide range of conditions with established validity and reliability, or innovative in their design. We also provide an overview of the barriers and drivers to the use of Routine Outcome Measurement (ROM) in clinical practice

Fast, Linear Time Hierarchical Clustering using the Baire Metric

The Baire metric induces an ultrametric on a dataset and is of linear computational complexity, contrasted with the standard quadratic time agglomerative hierarchical clustering algorithm. In this work we evaluate empirically this new approach to hierarchical clustering. We compare hierarchical clustering based on the Baire metric with (i) agglomerative hierarchical clustering, in terms of algorithm properties; (ii) generalized ultrametrics, in terms of definition; and (iii) fast clustering through k-means partititioning, in terms of quality of results. For the latter, we carry out an in depth astronomical study. We apply the Baire distance to spectrometric and photometric redshifts from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey using, in this work, about half a million astronomical objects. We want to know how well the (more costly to determine) spectrometric redshifts can predict the (more easily obtained) photometric redshifts, i.e. we seek to regress the spectrometric on the photometric redshifts, and we use clusterwise regression for this.Comment: 27 pages, 6 tables, 10 figure