Illness Risk Factors of Athletes Preparing for the Summer Olympics
by George Blackwell
81 Olympic athletes from 11 sports completed questionnaires nine months before the Rio 2016 Olympic Games. These included specific measures for Mental Health, Perceived Levels of Stress, Resilience, Energy Availability, Sleep Quality and Hygiene, to determine the key factors influencing illness around training or competition. An illness was defined as an event which limited training or competition for greater hours in the prior month.
Out of the 81 respondents (26 male, 55 female), there were 16 illness cases and 65 controls. Low energy availability, depression symptoms and higher perceived stress were each significantly associated with illness. Female athletes were also shown to be at higher odds of illness than men.
The study concluded that low energy availability, hygiene practices and mental health were significantly associated with ‘sport incapacity’ (aka a loss of training time) in athletes preparing the Olympic Games. They concluded that practical considerations in prevention of illness in athletes should be multifactorial to account for the breadth of issues that can come up. Professionals that are given this responsibility need to investigate athletes’ psychological, environmental, nutritional, and hygienic components at a minimum to get a representative idea of the contributing factors to illness.
Low energy availability has the highest attributable influence in the athlete population. Further research is needed to investigate its underlying causes and what types of corrective action can be taken. Athletes who have been ill report lower levels of success and feelings of personal accomplishment, which highlights the deep multifactorial connections between health, illness and individual perceptions on performance in high-level athletes.
Gender also leads to different types of impacts, with low-energy availability and being female being significantly correlated with high levels of illness.
For all types of athletes – whether amateur or professional – this sort of study highlights, above all, the complex nature of factors that can impact upon your health, wellbeing and performance. No aspect is irrelevant and all the components above need to form part of your training considerations.
This research was funded by the Australian Institute of Sport High Performance Research Fund and the Queensland Academy of Sport Centre of Excellence for Applied Sport Science Research. All participants that took part did so on a voluntary basis. The findings contribute to the ‘Stay Healthy’ project, an initiative that supports Australia’s elite athletes. The research can be considered trustworthy and robust, with the Australian Collaboration for Research into Injury in Sport and its Prevention (ACRISP) being one of the International Research Centres for Prevention of Injury and Protection of Athlete Health that is supported by the International Olympic Committee (IOC).
References:
Drew, M.K., Vlahovich, N., Hughes, D., Appaneal, R., Peterson, K., Burke, L., Lundy, B., Toomey, M., Watts, D., Lovell, G. and Praet, S., 2017. A multifactorial evaluation of illness risk factors in athletes preparing for the Summer Olympic Games. Journal of Science and Medicine in Sport, 20(8), pp.745-750.