The Olympic Movement Medical Code encourages all stakeholders to ensure that sport is practised without danger to the health of the athletes. Systematic surveillance of injuries and illnesses is the foundation for developing preventive measures in sport.To analyse the injuries and illnesses that occurred during the Games of the XXX Olympiad, held in London in 2012.We recorded the daily occurrence (or non-occurrence) of injuries and illnesses (1) through the reporting of all National Olympic Committee (NOC) medical teams and (2) in the polyclinic and medical venues by the London Organising Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games' (LOCOG) medical staff.In total, 10 568 athletes (4676 women and 5892 men) from 204 NOCs participated in the study. NOC and LOCOG medical staff reported 1361 injuries and 758 illnesses, equalling incidences of 128.8 injuries and 71.7 illnesses per 1000 athletes. Altogether, 11% and 7% of the athletes incurred at least one injury or illness, respectively. The risk of an athlete being injured was the highest in taekwondo, football, BMX, handball, mountain bike, athletics, weightlifting, hockey and badminton, and the lowest in archery, canoe slalom and sprint, track cycling, rowing, shooting and equestrian. 35% of the injuries were expected to prevent the athlete from participating during competition or training. Women suffered 60% more illnesses than men (86.0 vs 53.3 illnesses per 1000 athletes). The rate of illness was the highest in athletics, beach volleyball, football, sailing, synchronised swimming and taekwondo. A total of 310 illnesses (41%) affected the respiratory system and the most common cause of illness was infection (n=347, 46%).At least 11% of the athletes incurred an injury during the games and 7% of the athletes' an illness. The incidence of injuries and illnesses varied substantially among sports. Future initiatives should include the development of preventive measures tailored for each specific sport and the continued focus among sport bodies to institute and further develop scientific injury and illness surveillance systems.

There is little information on the plasma free amino acid patterns of elite athletes against which fatigue and nutrition can be considered. Therefore the aim was to include analysis of this pattern in the medical screening of elite athletes during both especially intense and light training periods.Plasma amino acid analysis was undertaken in three situations. (1) A medical screening service was offered to elite athletes during an intense training period before the 1992 Olympics. Screening included a blood haematological/biochemical profile and a microbial screen in athletes who presented with infection. The athletes were divided into three groups who differed in training fatigue and were considered separately. Group A (21 track and field athletes) had no lasting fatigue; group B (12 judo competitors) reported heavy fatigue at night but recovered overnight to continue training; group C (18 track and field athletes, one rower) had chronic fatigue and had been unable to train normally for at least several weeks. (2) Athletes from each group were further screened during a post-Olympic light training period. (3) Athletes who still had low amino acid levels during the light training period were reanalysed after three weeks of additional protein intake.(1) The pre-Olympics amino acid patterns were as follows. Group A had a normal amino acid pattern (glutamine 554 (25.2) micromol/l, histidine 79 (6.1) micromol/l, total amino acids 2839 (92.1) micromol/l); all results are means (SEM). By comparison, both groups B and C had decreased plasma glutamine (average 33%; p<0.001) with, especially in group B, decreased histidine, glucogenic, ketogenic, and branched chain amino acids (p<0.05 to p<0.001). None in group A, one in group B, but ten athletes in group C presented with infection: all 11 athletes had plasma glutamine levels of less than 450 micromol/l. No intergroup differences in haematological or other blood biochemical parameters, apart from a lower plasma creatine kinase activity in group C than in group B (p<0.05) and a low neutrophil to lymphocyte ratio in the athletes with viral infections (1.2 (0.17)), were found. (2) During post-Olympic light training, group A showed no significant amino acid changes. In contrast, group B recovered normal amino acid levels (glutamine 528 (41.4) micromol/l, histidine 76 (5.3) micromol/l, and total amino acids 2772 (165) micromol/l) (p<0.05 to p<0.001) to give a pattern comparable with that of group A, whereas, in group C, valine and threonine had increased (p<0.05), but glutamine (441 (24.5) micromol/l) and histidine (58 (5.3) micromol/l) remained low. Thus none in group A, two in group B, but ten (53%) in group C still had plasma glutamine levels below 450 micromol/l, including eight of the 11 athletes who had presented with infection. (3) With the additional protein intake, virtually all persisting low glutamine levels increased to above 500 micromol/l. Plasma glutamine rose to 592 (35.1) micromol/l and histidine to 86 (6.0) micromol/l. Total amino acids increased to 2761 (128) micromol/l (p<0.05 to p<0.001) and the amino acid pattern normalised. Six of the ten athletes on this protein intake returned to increased training within the three weeks.Analysis of these results provided contrasting plasma amino acid patterns: (a) a normal pattern in those without lasting fatigue; (b) marked but temporary changes in those with acute fatigue; (c) a persistent decrease in plasma amino acids, mainly glutamine, in those with chronic fatigue and infection, for which an inadequate protein intake appeared to be a factor.

In general, women are well represented among sport participants and sport audiences but not in the media. Data show that women's sport is greatly underreported and trivialized in newspapers. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to measure press coverage during the 2000 Summer Olympic Games in the largest circulating Belgian, Danish, French, and Italian daily newspapers by: (a) number of articles, (b) size, (c) page placement, (d) accompanyingphotographs, and (e) photograph size. For each sport covered, the athletes' nationality and the gender were recorded. Compared to the 1996 Atlanta Games, there was an increase of 326 female athletes (+4 %), and women competed in 25 sports and 132 events (44 %) of the total 300 events. Although only 29.3 % of the articles and 38 % of photos were on women 's sports, the newspaper coverage was similar to the distribution of participating athletes and events. No significant gender differences were found with respect to article size, page placement, accompanying photographs, or photograph size. The most covered sport was track and field, independent of national achievement. Other sports received different coverage in relation to national expectations, achievement, and participation. In conclusion, there was a trend to overcome gender inequities in media coverage during the Olympic Games, which may be due to the International Olympic Committee's actions to promote increased participation of women in sport activities and to publicize their achievements. Moreover, during the Olympic Games, a nationalistic fervor might affect the equality of gender coverage.

Develop and evaluate a natural language processing application for classifying chief complaints into syndromic categories for syndromic surveillance.Much of the input data for artificial intelligence applications in the medical field are free-text patient medical records, including dictated medical reports and triage chief complaints. To be useful for automated systems, the free-text must be translated into encoded form.We implemented a biosurveillance detection system from Pennsylvania to monitor the 2002 Winter Olympic Games. Because input data was in free-text format, we used a natural language processing text classifier to automatically classify free-text triage chief complaints into syndromic categories used by the biosurveillance system. The classifier was trained on 4700 chief complaints from Pennsylvania. We evaluated the ability of the classifier to classify free-text chief complaints into syndromic categories with a test set of 800 chief complaints from Utah.The classifier produced the following areas under the ROC curve: Constitutional = 0.95; Gastrointestinal = 0.97; Hemorrhagic = 0.99; Neurological = 0.96; Rash = 1.0; Respiratory = 0.99; Other = 0.96. Using information stored in the system's semantic model, we extracted from the Respiratory classifications lower respiratory complaints and lower respiratory complaints with fever with a precision of 0.97 and 0.96, respectively.Results suggest that a trainable natural language processing text classifier can accurately extract data from free-text chief complaints for biosurveillance.