The Decision to Play: College football in the Era of COVID-19

COVID-19 upended life around the world, including on college campuses across the U.S. where institutions restructured their class modalities, campus life, extracurricular activities, and intercollegiate athletics - including college football. We examine the factors that led universities to make their decisions to play or not play college football during fall 2020, hypothesizing that the decision to play would be consistent with the decision about class modality for health and safety reasons, and that monetary and political motivations would also play a significant role. We collected data for 249 institutions and used logistic regression techniques to test our hypotheses. We ultimately found that health and safety concerns were not the driving factors in the decision to play college football in the fall of 2020, but economics and politics were statistically significant factors

Exercise mediated protection of diabetic heart through modulation of microRNA mediated molecular pathways

Abstract Hyperglycaemia, hypertension, dyslipidemia and insulin resistance collectively impact on the myocardium of people with diabetes, triggering molecular, structural and myocardial abnormalities. These have been suggested to aggravate oxidative stress, systemic inflammation, myocardial lipotoxicity and impaired myocardial substrate utilization. As a consequence, this leads to the development of a spectrum of cardiovascular diseases, which may include but not limited to coronary endothelial dysfunction, and left ventricular remodelling and dysfunction. Diabetic heart disease (DHD) is the term used to describe the presence of heart disease specifically in diabetic patients. Despite significant advances in medical research and long clinical history of anti-diabetic medications, the risk of heart failure in people with diabetes never declines. Interestingly, sustainable and long-term exercise regimen has emerged as an effective synergistic therapy to combat the cardiovascular complications in people with diabetes, although the precise molecular mechanism(s) underlying this protection remain unclear. This review provides an overview of the underlying mechanisms of hyperglycaemia- and insulin resistance-mediated DHD with a detailed discussion on the role of different intensities of exercise in mitigating these molecular alterations in diabetic heart. In particular, we provide the possible role of exercise on microRNAs, the key molecular regulators of several pathophysiological processes