We are the Amsterdam Collaboration on Health & Safety in Sports (ACHSS). An initiative that brings together, within the Amsterdam UMC, two Dutch leading academic groups on research and clinical practice of athlete health protection. The ACHSS initiative is one of the 11 IOC Research Centers for Prevention of Injury and Protection of Athlete Health.
Through this website we will keep you updated on our own research and others' who deal with these topics.
Sports injury prevention is becoming increasingly important in organised sports. This domain has evolved rapidly in the last decades, leading to a better understanding of peripheral risk factors and injury mechanisms. This line of research focuses on the role of the brain in the context of primary sports injury prevention and the influence of fatigue on the injury risk profile of athletes.
Last Wednesday, October 6th, Bruno Tassignon has successfully defended his PhD Thesis. Functional performance tests and return-to-sport decision-making: Focusing on translational research with special interest in fatigue and the brain. Another successful collaboration between our group and the MFYS Laboratory of Prof. Romain Meeussen. Although the defence has already taken place, we do like to share the content of Bruno’s thesis as it holds some key practical implications.
On Wednesday, April 21st, Jo Verschueren will defend his PhD Thesis. The interaction of fatigue and adaptability with lower extremity functional performance tests. A wonderful collaboration between our group and the MFYS Laboratory of Romain Meeussen. His defence is public and can be joined through … http://www.youtube.com/VUBeadlesOffice (Wednesday April 21st. 11.45 - 13.00). A summary can be found behind this link.
Our last post was on the effect of mental fatigue on clinical decision tools for injury risk. Now we can top that up with a twin study looking at physical fatigue. Same overall conclusions, fatigue affects the outcome of employed screening tests. Consider then that when injuries occur on the field … usually, some form of acute fatigue is present.
This recent study we published is very fundamental but imagine the clinical implications. We employ balance tasks for risk assessment, return-to-play decisions, and performance measures. Normally in non-fatigued conditions. But, did you know the outcomes of these test change when the subject is fatigued?
Balance tests are commonly used in clinical practice with applicability in injury prevention and return to sport decisions. While most sports injuries occur in a changing environment where reacting to a non-planned stimulus is of great importance, these balance tests only evaluate pre-planned movements without taking these dynamics environmental aspects into account. Therefore, the goal of this paper was to describe the development of a clinician-friendly test that respects these contextual interactions and to describe the test protocol of an adapted Y-balance test that includes environmental perception and decision-making.
Just published in Sports Medicine, this systematic review was to identify prospective studies that used a criteria-based return to sport (RTS) decision-making process for patients with lateral ankle sprain (LAS) injury. We found that currently there are no published evidence-based criteria to inform RTS decisions for patients with an LAS injury. A narrative synthesis proposed a number of variables that could be used to develop a criteria-based RTS decision paradigm.
