The use of mouthguards in contact sports effectively prevents oral injury and preserves oral structures. We investigated oral injuries and awareness concerning mouthguards among Japanese high school soccer and rugby players. Athletes were asked a series of questions concerning their history of oral injury while participating in sports, and their pattern of mouthguard use was determined. The data were evaluated statistically using chi-square analysis. The incidence of oral injuries was 32.3% for soccer athletes and 56.5% for rugby athletes, with 0.8% and 24.1% of the respective groups having mouthguards. There were significant differences between the soccer and rugby groups (P < 0.001). Although 81.8% of soccer athletes thought mouthguards were unnecessary, only 26.2% of rugby athletes shared this opinion and there was a significant difference between the soccer and rugby groups. Many soccer athletes had insufficient knowledge about mouthguards and were not concerned about preventing oral injury, although it was in fact a common problem in their sport. Athletes as well as coaches must be made aware of the high risk of oral injury when playing soccer, rugby, and other contact sports.

No abstract

Inferring genetic networks from gene expression data is the most challenging work in the post-genomic era. However, most studies tend to show their genetic network inference ability by using artificial data. Here, we developed the fuzzy adaptive resonance theory associated matrix (F-ART matrix) method to infer genetic networks and applied it to experimental time series data, which are gene expression profiles of Saccharomyces cerevisiae responding under oxidative stresses such as diamide, heat shock and H2O2. We preprocessed them using the fuzzy adaptive resonance theory and successfully identified genetic interactions by drawing a 2-dimensional matrix. The identified interactions between diamide and heat shock stress were confirmed to be the common interactions for two stresses, compared with the KEGG metabolic map, BRITE protein interaction map, and gene interaction data of other papers. In the predicted common genetic network, the hit ratio was 60% for the KEGG map. Several gene interactions were also drawn, which have been reported to be important in oxidative stress. This result suggests that F-ART matrix has the potential to function as a new method to extract the common genetic networks of two different stresses using experimental time series microarray data.