The Holidays and the New Year

Two elves wishing you all the best these holidays!

Happy Holidays from all of us at the Clinical Journal of Sports Medicine!

If you celebrate Christmas, I hope your day yesterday was restful.  And who in the sporting world, if given the chance, doesn’t celebrate Boxing Day?!!!  I wish I were in the UK right now watching Man City v. Liverpool.  That should be a great match!

This is a time of year for reflection for us all, as 2013 winds down and 2014 is set to start.  Reflection:  I thought I would do just that in this brief holiday posting.

We published many important studies in the six issues of CJSM in 2013.  Several studies looked at the subject of concussion, one of the ‘hot topics’  in primary care sports medicine.  Among the highlights of the year were the publication in our pages of two important consensus statements on concussion:  in January we published the American Medical Society for Sports Medicine position statement, and in March we offered up the Zurich 2012 Consensus Statement on Concussion in Sport.

I hope you were able to catch the July study on the changes in BESS performance over the course of a 90 day season,a critical look at one of the instruments used in the assessment of concussions.   We had three studies that focused on the injury in the September issue: i)  “The Prevalence of Undiagnosed Concussions in Athletes;”  ii) a study on the effects of sleep quality and quantity on baseline concussion assessments; and iii) one on the impact of an educational intervention on college athletes’ knowledge about concussions.

In the virtual pages of this blog, we highlighted three rising research stars in the field of sport-related concussion in our ‘5 Questions with CJSM’ format:  Drs. Jason Mihalik, William Meehan, and Keith Yeates.  Click on those links to see these researchers’ candid commentaries.

And to top it all off, the CJSM editorial staff made available in August a collection of 10 published papers and studies on the issue of concussion.  Check it out if you haven’t already.

There’s more to primary care sports medicine than concussion, of course.  Some of my personal favorites among the varied collection of studies published this year include one that identified a possible genetic marker for exercise-associated muscle cramping; one that found no effect on muscle strength in female athletes who were taking oral contraceptives; and a case report on a cluster of exertional rhabdomyolysis in collegiate American football players, which I reviewed in a blog post.

I love the variety of sports we profile in CJSM.  We published studies in 2013 that looked at ballet, aussie football, snowboarding, flag football, and ringette, to name a smattering!  And there was the sadness of the 2013 Boston Marathon, which I profiled in an April blog post.  #BostonStrong: I’m closing out the year still thinking of my sports medicine colleagues who were at the finish line of that event, stepping up to the plate in a way one would never expect in that setting.

Reflections
(Photo of the Ponte Vecchio
Courtesy of Wikimedia and Martin Falbisoner)

I could go on, but that would violate the spirit of the season I think.  Better yet to put the laptop aside…..and sit back……reflecting on the work accomplished in 2013, and anticipating that to come in 2014.

Happy Holidays, Happy New Year to you all!