Published in a peer-reviewed journalOriginal research

Longitudinal Changes in Cognitive Functioning and Brain Structure in Professional Boxers and Mixed Martial Artists After They Stop Fighting

Xiaowei Zhuang, Lauren Bennett, Rajesh Nandy, Dietmar Cordes, Charles Bernick, Aaron Ritter. 2022. Neurology.

Read the full textDOI 10.1212/wnl.0000000000201158PubMed 36104283

The medical question

How should research measure and protect a fighter’s neurological health over time?

This evidence informs questions about cumulative exposure, neurological assessment and long-term health. The Fight Medicine Research Institute examines the study design, the fighters included and the outcomes measured when developing its own research questions.

Summary

Researchers compared repeated cognitive, MRI and biomarker measurements in fighters who stopped fighting and sparring and matched fighters who remained active. The groups showed different trajectories.

What the abstract reports

  • 45 male fighters who had no sanctioned fights and no sparring for two years were compared with 45 matched male fighters who stayed active.
  • The two groups followed different paths in verbal memory, psychomotor speed, processing speed and neurofilament light levels. Fighters who stopped showed improved cognitive scores and falling neurofilament light. Active fighters showed declining cognitive scores.
  • Cortical thickness measures stabilised at group level in the fighters who stopped and declined slightly in those who stayed active.

Publication status and notices

Published in a peer-reviewed journal. Longitudinal matched cohort analysis in Neurology. PubMed publication type: Journal Article.

No correction, retraction or expression of concern was found in PubMed, Crossref or Scite when this record was checked.

Fight Medicine Research Institute contribution

Fight Medicine Research Institute selected and catalogued this study, prepared an original research summary, verified its bibliographic details, and maintains the associated citation record.

The Fight Medicine Research Institute has also published a selected-paper appraisal of this source: Brain measures after fighters stop competing.

Article details

Relationship
External research catalogued by the Fight Medicine Research Institute. The original authors, journal and DOI are unchanged.
Published online
No online date in the publisher’s Crossref deposit
Issue date
15 November 2022, volume 99, issue 20
Repository date
14 November 2022 (Europe PMC first-publication date)
Date used here
14 November 2022 (Europe PMC first-publication date)
Rights
CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Open access under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives licence (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), as recorded by Europe PMC and the licence link in the source record. The licence does not cover commercial reuse or adapted versions. The summary on this page is Fight Medicine Research Institute’s own wording. No abstract text, figure or table from the article is reproduced here. Licence terms.
Source check
, against PubMed (NCBI), Crossref, Europe PMC and Scite. Checked under the direction of Casey C. Sears, Founder. An LLM was utilized as a research tool with direct human oversight.
Appraisal
The check covered bibliographic details, links, licence and notices. It is not a formal critical appraisal of the full paper; the linked selected-paper appraisal is a separate output.
Clinical review
None. This record is a research summary, not clinical education.
Funding and conflicts
See the source record for the authors’ funding and disclosures.
Catalog
FH-004, added

Cite the original work

These files cite the work by its own authors, journal and DOI. Fight Medicine Research Institute appears only in a note, as curator of this catalog page.

Download RISDownload BibTeX

Related on this website