ArticleJournal of Alzheimer's disease : JAD2022
Quantifying and Examining Reserve in Symptomatic Former National Football League Players.
Article in Journal of Alzheimer's disease : JAD, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 1 paper.
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Who cites it
1 citing paper in PubMed, 1 citations in OpenAlex.
- Younger Age of First Exposure to American Football Is Associated with Worse Informant-Reported Clinical Outcomes in Older Age Brain Donors.Journal of neurotrauma · 2026Article
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Authors and funding
20 authors at 6 institutions in 5 countries.
Funding
Abstract
backgroundRepetitive head impacts (RHI) from contact sports have been associated with cognitive and neuropsychiatric disorders. However, not all individuals exposed to RHI develop such disorders. This may be explained by the reserve hypothesis. It remains unclear if the reserve hypothesis accounts for the heterogenous symptom presentation in RHI-exposed individuals. Moreover, optimal measurement of reserve in this population is unclear and likely unique from non-athlete populations.
objectiveWe examined the association between metrics of reserve and cognitive and neuropsychiatric functioning in 89 symptomatic former National Football League players.
methodsIndividual-level proxies (e.g., education) defined reserve. We additionally quantified reserve as remaining residual variance in 1) episodic memory and 2) executive functioning performance, after accounting for demographics and brain pathology. Associations between reserve metrics and cognitive and neuropsychiatric functioning were examined.
resultsHigher reading ability was associated with better attention/information processing (β=0.25; 95% CI, 0.05-0.46), episodic memory (β=0.27; 95% CI, 0.06-0.48), semantic and phonemic fluency (β=0.24; 95% CI, 0.02-0.46; β=0.38; 95% CI, 0.17-0.59), and behavioral regulation (β=-0.26; 95% CI, -0.48, -0.03) performance. There were no effects for other individual-level proxies. Residual episodic memory variance was associated with better attention/information processing (β=0.45; 95% CI, 0.25, 0.65), executive functioning (β=0.36; 95% CI, 0.15, 0.57), and semantic fluency (β=0.38; 95% CI, 0.17, 0.59) performance. Residual executive functioning variance was associated with better attention/information processing (β=0.44; 95% CI, 0.24, 0.64) and episodic memory (β=0.37; 95% CI, 0.16, 0.58) performance.
conclusionTraditional reserve proxies (e.g., years of education, occupational attainment) have limitations and may be unsuitable for use in elite athlete samples. Alternative approaches of reserve quantification may prove more suitable for this population.
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