Discussion: Increasing reports that excessive training is bad
in: Orienteering; News
Apr 3, 2014 12:21 AM
#
Yet another report showing that intensive exercise can be bad for male marathoners.
http://www.msma.org/docs/communications/MoMed/Hear...
I'd hazard a guess that many orienteers train and race just as hard as marathoners do.
Question is, is the quality of life that the marathoners have better than those who are sedentary and worth the risk?
http://www.msma.org/docs/communications/MoMed/Hear...
I'd hazard a guess that many orienteers train and race just as hard as marathoners do.
Question is, is the quality of life that the marathoners have better than those who are sedentary and worth the risk?
Apr 3, 2014 12:58 AM
#
So, absent dead bodies (the ultimate proof), James H. O'Keefe embarks on a fishing expedition with an million-euro piece of Siemens equipment. Apparently no respected peer-reviewed journals are any longer interested (google "O'Keefe BMJ editorial", read it, and then find out what happened to the data), so he's reduced to publishing in The Journal of the Missouri State Medical Association.
SHOW ME THE DEAD BODIES!!
If: Run => Die. Then: Find out why die. May use expensive machine to investigate exactly what the "=>" looks like. I understand.
But no, Run => Die Less. But still use expensive machine, why, just because. Maybe Find Something. That Can Publish.
"[...] the mortality rates in the high mileage runners [...] did not exceed those for sedentary individuals." This from prior O'Keefeisms.
I digress. Back to the article.
"There was no difference in lesion prevalence between groups."
"[...] diameter stenosis [...] did not reach statistical significance between the two groups."
However, marathoners that did have plaque, the self-selected and not particularly well age-matched group, had more ccs of it than sedentary controls. That's all that the million-euro scanner had to say.
Do more ccs of plaque kill more?
Question unanswered.
Here's <THEORY>Runners have more blood vessels. Or better yet, wider blood vessels. Say by 25%. Take all the equal probabilities of plaque formation per surface area, multiply by the (observed) same thickness, get the 60% increase in the ccs.</THEORY> I like this theory. With the same plaque thickness, the hole is still wider if the baseline opening is wider. All that the article seems to prove is that running is not plaque-formation-protective. What matters is the outcome; careful epidemiology (using, e.g., the same data on which O'Keefe bases his scandalous article titles) says running is death-protective. With no observed limit to the quantity of such running, whatever O'Keefe may speculate.
O'Keefe keeps talking about U-shaped curves, but I am yet to see one, from him or otherwise, in which the right-hand arm is so within error bars that it's definitely a U and not an L or a backslash. If you know where I can find one, post a link.
In the meanwhile, slapping titles like "Hearts Breaking Over Marathon Running" on analysis that does not, in fact, show any detriment to anyone's health is certain to promulgate mentions and articles in popular, non-peer-reviewed publications. Perhaps that's the ultimate goal, since respected journals don't seem to care.
SHOW ME THE DEAD BODIES!!
If: Run => Die. Then: Find out why die. May use expensive machine to investigate exactly what the "=>" looks like. I understand.
But no, Run => Die Less. But still use expensive machine, why, just because. Maybe Find Something. That Can Publish.
"[...] the mortality rates in the high mileage runners [...] did not exceed those for sedentary individuals." This from prior O'Keefeisms.
I digress. Back to the article.
"There was no difference in lesion prevalence between groups."
"[...] diameter stenosis [...] did not reach statistical significance between the two groups."
However, marathoners that did have plaque, the self-selected and not particularly well age-matched group, had more ccs of it than sedentary controls. That's all that the million-euro scanner had to say.
Do more ccs of plaque kill more?
Question unanswered.
Here's <THEORY>Runners have more blood vessels. Or better yet, wider blood vessels. Say by 25%. Take all the equal probabilities of plaque formation per surface area, multiply by the (observed) same thickness, get the 60% increase in the ccs.</THEORY> I like this theory. With the same plaque thickness, the hole is still wider if the baseline opening is wider. All that the article seems to prove is that running is not plaque-formation-protective. What matters is the outcome; careful epidemiology (using, e.g., the same data on which O'Keefe bases his scandalous article titles) says running is death-protective. With no observed limit to the quantity of such running, whatever O'Keefe may speculate.
O'Keefe keeps talking about U-shaped curves, but I am yet to see one, from him or otherwise, in which the right-hand arm is so within error bars that it's definitely a U and not an L or a backslash. If you know where I can find one, post a link.
In the meanwhile, slapping titles like "Hearts Breaking Over Marathon Running" on analysis that does not, in fact, show any detriment to anyone's health is certain to promulgate mentions and articles in popular, non-peer-reviewed publications. Perhaps that's the ultimate goal, since respected journals don't seem to care.
This discussion thread is closed.