IT’S A CASE of the worst timing imaginable, but research reveals that up to 17% of athletes at major championships fall prey to an illness during the competition. Reporting on the website mysportscience.com, Mike Gleeson, emeritus professor at Loughborough University, revealed that the most common illnesses affecting athletes at the g athletes at the summer Olympics are those involving the respiratory tract, accounting for around 40% of all health complaints. Other illness affecting athletes at championships affect the digestive system (10-20%) and the skin or underlying tissues (10-15%). Gleeson says that championship “illness appears to be consistently more common in female athletes compared with their male counterparts, which is the opposite of what is found for the general adult population”.
Try telling that to the likes of Michael Rimmer, an athlete plagued by illness and who suffered a sickness bug in Rio for which he was later prescribed antiobiotics. After failing to progress from his 800m semi-final in Rio, he tweeted: “Sick as a dog. Now time to get healthy and prove I should have been in that final”. Rimmer was not alone in experiencing gastrointestinal problems and, in another new report, Raymond Playford, a gastrointestinal expert and professor of medicine at Plymouth University Peninsula Schools of Medicine and Dentistry, suggests the culprit for some athletes may have been “leaky gut” syndrome.
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01/09/2016
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