The decline in human performance with age at 5000 m, an athletic event requiring high VO max, is remarkably precise, and unavoidable, and related to entropy, even at an individual level. Women and men show an identical age-related decline, up to ~100 years old. The precision of the decline shows the limitations for therapy of aging.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe age-performance relationship describes changes in the organism's structural and functional capabilities over the course of the lifespan. The typical, empirical pattern is an asymmetrical inverted-U shape association with peak capacity occurring early in life. This process is well described in the literature, with an increasing interest in features that characterize this pattern, such as the rate of growth, age of peak performance, and rate of decline with aging.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFDuring the last decades, all para-athletes with disabilities have significantly increased their performance level due to technological progress and human investment, through better training or recovery protocols, medical care and nutritional monitoring. Among these elements, the athlete's age is one of the determining factors in performance. The aim of this study was to investigate the effect of age on maximal performances for para-athletes and wheelchair racing athletes, scaled on able-bodied records.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPhysical and cognitive performances change across lifespan. Studying cohorts of individuals in specific age ranges and athletic abilities remains essential in assessing the underlying physiological mechanisms that result in such a drop in performance. This decline is now viewed as a unique phenotypic biomarker and a hallmark of the aging process.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFElite performance in sports is known to be influenced by heritable components, but the magnitude of such an influence has never been quantified. We hypothesized that having a former world-class champion in the family increases the chances of an athlete to repeat the achievement of her or his kinship. We aimed to measure the heritability of a medal in the Olympic Games (OG) among Olympians and to estimate the percentage of the genetic contribution to such a heritance.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMaximal physical performances are powerful and accurate biomarkers in the understanding of age-related changes during the aging process. Previous studies have characterized age-related changes from Caenorhabditis elegans to Homo sapiens. We characterized changes in this pattern for H.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: An inverse relationship exists between physical activity and many non-communicable diseases, such as obesity. Given the daily time spent, a logical domain to reach an adult population for intervention is within and around the workplace. Many government bodies, including the World Health Organization (WHO), include worksite health promotions (WHPs) targeted at increasing physical activity as a public health intervention.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFEchoing scientific and industrial progress, the Twentieth century was an unprecedented period of improvement for human capabilities and performances, with a significant increase in lifespan, adult height, and maximal physiological performance. Analyses of historical data show a major slow down occurring in the most recent years. This triggered large and passionate debates in the academic scene within multiple disciplines; as such an observation could be interpreted as our upper biological limits.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFLocomotion is one of the major physiological functions for most animals. Previous studies have described aging mechanisms linked to locomotor performance among different species. However, the precise dynamics of these age-related changes, and their interactions with development and senescence, are largely unknown.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFLimits to athletic performance have long been a topic of myth and debate. However, sport performance appears to have reached a state of stagnation in recent years, suggesting that the physical capabilities of humans and other athletic species, such as greyhounds and thoroughbreds, cannot progress indefinitely. Although the ultimate capabilities may be predictable, the exact path for the absolute maximal performance values remains difficult to assess and relies on technical innovations, sport regulation, and other parameters that depend on current societal and economic conditions.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Whereas intense physical activity has been associated with deleterious effects on elite athletes' health, in particular due to cardiovascular anomalies, long-term follow-ups have suggested lower mortality rates among elite athletes. Causes of death for French Olympic athletes and female elite athletes have not been studied.
Hypothesis/purpose: We aimed to measure overall and disease-specific mortality of French female and male Olympians compared with the French general population.
J Gerontol A Biol Sci Med Sci
August 2015
Life-span trends progression has worldwide practical implications as it may affect the sustainability of modern societies. We aimed to describe the secular life-span trends of populations with a propensity to live longer-Olympians and supercentenarians-under two hypotheses: an ongoing life-span extension versus a biologic "probabilistic barrier" limiting further progression. In a study of life-span densities (total number of life durations per birth date), we analyzed 19,012 Olympians and 1,205 supercentenarians deceased between 1900 and 2013.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe purpose of this study is to investigate the association between anthropometric characteristics and performance in all track and field running events and assess Body Mass Index (BMI) as a relevant performance indicator. Data of mass, height, BMI and speed were collected for the top 100 international men athletes in track events from 100 m to marathon for the 1996-2011 seasons, and analyzed by decile of performance. Speed is significantly associated with mass (r = 0.
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