Age-Related Trajectories of Brain Structure-Function Coupling in Female Roller Derby Athletes.

Derek C Monroe,Samantha L Dubois,Donna M Duffy,Christopher K Rhea

doi:10.3390/brainsci12010022

Abstract

Contact and collision sports are believed to accelerate brain aging. Postmortem studies of the human brain have implicated tau deposition in and around the perivascular space as a biomarker of an as yet poorly understood neurodegenerative process. Relatively little is known about the effects that collision sport participation has on the age-related trajectories of macroscale brain structure and function, particularly in female athletes. Diffusion MRI and resting-state functional MRI were obtained from female collision sport athletes (n = 19 roller derby (RD) players; 23–45 years old) and female control participants (n = 14; 20–49 years old) to quantify structural coupling (SC) and decoupling (SD). The novel and interesting finding is that RD athletes, but not controls, exhibited increasing SC with age in two association networks: the frontoparietal network, important for cognitive control, and default-mode network, a task-negative network (permuted p = 0.0006). Age-related increases in SC were also observed in sensorimotor networks (RD, controls) and age-related increases in SD were observed in association networks (controls) (permuted p ≤ 0.0001). These distinct patterns suggest that competing in RD results in compressed neuronal timescales in critical networks as a function of age and encourages the broader study of female athlete brains across the lifespan.

Highlights

Sci. 2022, 12, 22. https://doi.org/Physical activity and exercise promote healthy brain network organization across the lifespan [1,2,3,4]
The partial least squares (PLS) analysis testing the primary hypothesis of different age-related trajectories of structural coupling (SC ) and decoupling (SD ) between roller derby (RD) athletes and controls revealed two latent variables (LVs)
Compared to to male male athletes, athletes, relatively relatively little little is is known known about about brain brain structure structure and and funcfunction in female athletes, post-collegiate female athletes competing in collision tion in female athletes, post-collegiate female athletes competing in collision sports

Summary

Introduction

Sci. 2022, 12, 22. https://doi.org/Physical activity and exercise promote healthy brain network organization across the lifespan [1,2,3,4]. Sports are commonly touted as an enjoyable way to obtain these benefits, yet sports carrying a risk of incidental contacts between a player and other people or objects (contact sports) and sports that involve purposeful collisions (collision sports) can result in mechanical loading of the athlete’s head [5,6,7], which may accelerate cognitive aging [8,9,10,11]. The pathogenic mechanisms linking exposure and neurodegeneration are as yet poorly understood. These processes are only detectable by postmortem assays of phosphorylated tau in neurons, astrocytes, and the perivascular space around small vessels at the depths of the cortical sulci [13]. Attempts to relate antemortem brain imaging [14] or biofluid biomarkers [15] to clinical measures have yielded mixed results

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