JCI table of contents, June 1, 2006
... how long is too much for the heart? High-powered athletes and pregnant women often experience physiologic cardiac hypertrophy a beneficial and necessary increase in heart size and pumping capacity that allows them to maintain necessary cardiac output under conditions of physiologic stress. However, hypertr...Lactic acid not athlete's poison, but an energy source - if you know how to use it
...story: Lactic acid can be your friend. Coaches and athletes don't realize it, says exercise physiologist Georg...re lactate is burned for energy. "The world's best athletes stay competitive by interval training," Brooks said, referring to repeated short, but intense, bouts...New antimicrobial compound adheres to skin to promote healing
... applications, particularly with swimmers or other athletes and people in military settings. "In high-school athletics especially, getting staph infections from scratches is a huge problem. Our bioadhesive can adhere to wet skin, cleanse the wound and promote healing," he said, adding that they're also lookin...Using stem cells to repair torn tendons
Weekend athletes who overexert themselves running or playing basketball may one day reap the benefits of research that shows adult stem cells can make new tendon tissue. Researchers Dan Gazit and colleagues at Hadassah Medical Center in Israel engineered mouse mesen...Getting ACL tears to heal themselves
... repair that would decrease recovery time and give athletes a knee with more normal function. With funding from the NIH, the National Football League, the Orthopedic Research and Education Foundation and the Center for Minimally Invasive Technology (Cambridge, Mass.), she is developing an arthroscopic approac...Growth hormone is made in the brain, report scientists
...l women using estrogen replacement therapy and for athletes taking growth hormone and anabolic steroids to increase muscle mass. The scientists suspect that reasoning and mood may also be affected by these differences in the amount of growth hormone in the brain. "Growth hormone has been associated with grow...Ironman study redefines fine-tuned: Balance training time with blood pressure variability
...ise time and a WNET of 28 hours. Our well-trained' athletes achieved only between 20%-60% of this duration of ...resting and could significantly impact training of athletes in the future. Furthermore, the authors implemented a sound and well controlled protocol to examine ...When seeing is misleading: Clutter leads to high-confidence errors
...be relatively trivial, explaining why professional athletes often end up wasting their time arguing questionable calls with an official. Or they could prove a matter of life and death, perhaps accounting for why eyewitness testimony can be unreliable--or why soldiers sometimes can't tell friend from foe in th...Are dancers genetically different than the rest of us? Yes, says Hebrew University researcher
... compared with those of two other groups examined athletes as well as those who were both non-dancers and non-athletes. (Athletes were chosen for comparison since they require a good deal of physical stamina like dancers.) When the results were combined and analyzed, it was clearly shown that the dancers exh...Research shows brain's ability to overcome pain and thirst
...in order to survive - a mechanism that helps elite athletes to 'push through the pain barrier'. The Florey's D...pond to in order to survive," he said. "Many elite athletes have an ability to balance their priority switch longer than most people so they can push through no...Newer football helmet design may reduce incidence of concussions in high school players
...concussion rates and recovery times of high school athletes wearing newer helmet technology to those wearing h...udy, the annual concussion rate was 5.4 percent in athletes wearing the Revolution helmet, compared to a 7.6 annual percent rate in athletes wearing standard he...Soy diet worsens heart disease in mice, says University of Colorado at Boulder study
... said. HCM is the leading cause of death in young athletes and affects about one in 500 people, although milder forms of the disease often go undiagnosed, said Leinwand. To date, 18 genes associated with HCM have been identified and several more are being investigated, she said. Soy foods and diet suppleme...Sontra Medical and HortResearch form partnership to develop sports performance technology
... out of the doctor's needle, could soon help elite athletes and sports teams develop the winning edge. Sontra ...e are very impressed by HortResearch's vision that athletes can optimize their individual performance by monitoring the body's natural production of endogenous ...A water tale for all seasons: When it comes to hydration and exercise, the system works
...es as temperature rises It's well recognized that athletes perform progressively better as the temperature falls from hot to cool. It is also known that dehydration worsens performance in the heat, but its effect in milder environments is not well understood. A USARIEM team led by Samuel N. Cheuvront found ...Young athletes ignore skin cancer risk
CINCINNATI--Thousands of young athletes are at such high risk for developing skin cancer, ...ical student Erica Hamant revealed that most young athletes ignore the danger. Reported in the August edition of the Journal of the American Academy of Dermato...Exercise aside, genes may ultimately dictate seniors' mobility
..."Now energy storage near muscles may benefit young athletes engaged in endurance activities, but in older persons, accumulation of leg fat has been linked to poorer muscle function and metabolic diseases like diabetes." The study, funded by the National Institute on Aging and the Claude D. Pepper Older Americ...Happy and passive means more productive animals
...onsumers and animals," he said. The old adage that athletes are born and not made may be even truer of animals. "If you're born with really, really passive genes, it will be hard for you to become nasty and aggressive," Muir said. "Animals don't have the ability to see into the future and decide that 'if I'm ...Scientists discover the body's marijuana-like compounds are crucial for stress-induced pain relief
...inhibitor. Scientists have long known that injured athletes or even gunshot victims have a period of time in which the body's pain reaction is delayed. This effect is called "stress-induced analgesia." By the mid-1990s, researchers had targeted the sites of action of the brain's naturally occurring marijuana-...Lance Armstrong through a physiological lens: hard training boosts muscle power 8%
...ine with measurements expected from highly trained athletes during periods of detraining, Coyle added later. T...ave shown us how to improve already highly trained athletes by aiming at efficiency, which is a muscle phenomenon. But it's also nice to know," he added, "that ......nd that the parthenogenetic forms were much better athletes than the sexual forms, clearly outpacing them on the treadmill," said Kearney. "This was a bit of a surprise because a similar study of another kind of parthenogenetic lizard from the deserts of the United States showed the opposite pattern." Added ...