Blood Test-Based Age Acceleration Is Inversely Associated with High-Volume Sports Activity.

PURPOSE: We develop blood test-based aging clocks and examine how these clocks reflect high-volume sports activity. METHODS: We use blood tests and body metrics data of 421 Hungarian athletes and 283 age-matched controls (mean age, 24.1 and 23.9 yr, respectively), the latter selected from a group of healthy Caucasians of the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) to represent the general population ( n = 11,412). We train two age prediction models (i.e., aging clocks) using the NHANES dataset: the first model relies on blood test parameters only, whereas the second one additionally incorporates body measurements and sex. RESULTS: We find lower age acceleration among athletes compared with the age-matched controls with a median value of -1.7 and 1.4 yr, P < 0.0001. BMI is positively associated with age acceleration among the age-matched controls ( r = 0.17, P < 0.01) and the unrestricted NHANES population ( r = 0.11, P < 0.001). We find no association between BMI and age acceleration within the athlete dataset. Instead, age acceleration is positively associated with body fat percentage ( r = 0.21, P < 0.05) and negatively associated with skeletal muscle mass (Pearson r = -0.18, P < 0.05) among athletes. The most important blood test features in age predictions were serum ferritin, mean cell volume, blood urea nitrogen, and albumin levels. CONCLUSIONS: We develop and apply blood test-based aging clocks to adult athletes and healthy controls. The data suggest that high-volume sports activity is associated with slowed biological aging. Here, we propose an alternative, promising application of routine blood tests.

Right Ventricular Structure and Function in Adolescent Athletes: A 3D Echocardiographic Study.

The aim of this study was to characterize the right ventricular (RV) contraction pattern and its associations with exercise capacity in a large cohort of adolescent athletes using resting three-dimensional echocardiography (3DE). We enrolled 215 adolescent athletes (16±1 years, 169 males, 12±6 hours of training/week) and compared them to 38 age and sex-matched healthy, sedentary adolescents. We measured the 3DE-derived biventricular ejection fractions (EF). We also determined the relative contributions of longitudinal EF (LEF/RVEF) and radial EF (REF/RVEF) to the RVEF. Same-day cardiopulmonary exercise testing was performed to calculate VO2/kg. Both LV and RVEFs were significantly lower (athletes vs. controls; LVEF: 57±4 vs 61±3, RVEF: 55±5 vs 60±5%, p<0.001). Interestingly, while the relative contribution of radial shortening to the global RV EF was also reduced (REF/RVEF: 0.40±0.10 vs 0.49±0.06, p<0.001), the contribution of the longitudinal contraction was significantly higher in athletes (LEF/RVEF: 0.45±0.08 vs 0.40±0.07, p<0.01). The supernormal longitudinal shortening correlated weakly with a higher VO2/kg (r=0.138, P=0.044). Similarly to the adult athlete's heart, the cardiac adaptation of adolescent athletes comprises higher biventricular volumes and lower resting functional measures with supernormal RV longitudinal shortening. Characteristic exercise-induced structural and functional cardiac changes are already present in adolescence.