Eating disorders are associated with short and long-term consequences that can affect sports performance. The purposes of this study were to investigate whether female athletes, particularly gymnasts and footballers, exhibit more eating problems compared to female non-athletes, and to identify individual personality characteristics including anxiety, self-esteem, and perfectionism as possible contributors to eating disorder risk. In a sample of 120 participants, 80 adolescent female athletes were compared to a control condition of 40 non-athletes (mean age 17.2 ± 2.82). Participants responded to a questionnaire package to investigate the presence of disordered eating (SCOFF) and psychological variables in relation to disordered eating symptoms or eating disorder status. Subsequently, anthropometric measures were obtained individually by trained staff. There were statistically significant differences between conditions. One of the most important results was the score in SCOFF (Mann–Whitney = 604, p < 0.05; Cohen’s d = 0.52, r = 0.25), being higher in control than in the gymnast condition. These results suggest that non-athlete female adolescents show more disturbed eating behaviours and thoughts than female adolescents from aesthetic sport modalities and, therefore, may have an enhanced risk of developing clinical eating disorders.

Background: Aging is generally considered to be related to physical and cognitive decline. This is especially prominent in the frontal and parietal lobes, underlying executive functions and spatial memory, respectively. This process could be successfully mitigated in certain ways, such as through the practice of aerobic sports. With regard to this, dancing integrates physical exercise with music and involves retrieval of complex sequences of steps and movements creating choreographies. Methods: In this study, we compared 26 non-professional salsa dancers (mean age 55.3 years, age-range 49–70 years) with 20 non-dancers (mean age 57.6 years, age-range 49–70 years) by assessing two variables: their executive functions and spatial memory performance. Results: results showed that dancers scored better that non-dancers in our tests, outperforming controls in executive functions-related tasks. Groups did not differ in spatial memory performance. Conclusions: This work suggests that dancing can be a valid way of slowing down the natural age-related cognitive decline. A major limitation of this study is the lack of fitness assessment in both groups. In addition, since dancing combines multiple factors like social contact, aerobic exercise, cognitive work with rhythms, and music, it is difficult to determine the weight of each variable.

The goal of this study is to better understand the relation between the practice of Mindfulness and the sexual activity, sexual satisfaction and erotic fantasies of Spanish-speaking participants. This research focuses on the comparison between people who practice Mindfulness versus naïve people, and explores the practice of Mindfulness and its relation with the following variables about sexuality: body awareness and bodily dissociation, personal sexual satisfaction, partner and relationship-related satisfaction, desire, subjective sexual arousal, genital arousal, orgasm, pain, attitudes towards sexual fantasies and types of sexual fantasies. The sample consisted of 106 selected adults, 32 men and 74 women, who completed six measures on an online survey platform: (a) Mindfulness Attention Awareness Scale (MAAS), (b) Scale of Body Connection (SBC), (c) New Sexual Satisfaction Scale (NSSS), (d) Scale of Sexual Activity in Women (SSA-W) and Men (SSA-M), (e) Hurlbert Index of Sexual Fantasy (HISF), (f) Wilson’s Sex Fantasy Questionnaire. In the MAAS, Body Awareness subscale (SBC), NSSS, SSA-W and SSA-M, HISF and intimate fantasies subscale (Wilson’s questionnaire), people in the Mindfulness condition showed higher scores and these differences were statistically significant. These results may have relevant implications in the sexuality of clinical and non-clinical samples.

Patients with bowel diseases (inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) in general) tend to seek medical, nursing, and/or physiotherapeutic consultations. Physiotherapists specialized in gastrointestinal (visceral) therapy can help reduce inflammation in patients with ulcerative colitis (UC). In this study, we divided UC patients into three groups according to their age: the youngest (18–35 years old), middle-aged (36–49 years old), and oldest (50–70 years old). Our hypothesis was that gut inflammatory markers (zonulin and fecal calprotectin levels) and microbiota strains would exhibit age-dependent variations in UC patients. We compared differences in zonulin, calprotectin, and vitamin D levels, together with a plethora of microbiota strains, based on age. Calprotectin is a marker of intestinal inflammation and zonulin identifies gut permeability; as IBD is characterized by gastrointestinal inflammation, these are useful markers for diagnosing and monitoring treatment/s in IBD patients, including ulcerative colitis (UC). Dysbiosis can alter the normal balance of intestinal function, and thus, several microbiota strains were compared between different age ranges in UC patients. The results indicated that the middle-aged UC (36–49) patients had the highest endogenous vitamin D levels, as well as lower zonulin and calprotectin levels than the youngest (18–35) and oldest (50–70) UC participants, respectively. The middle-aged group also had lower Enterococcus, E. Coli biovare, and Pseudomonas spp. levels than the youngest UC participants. Meanwhile, the most LPS microbiota producers were found in middle-aged patients. Finally, a higher number of Candida albicans and elevated LPS were found in the oldest UC participants than in the middle-aged (36–49) group. This study was, however, limited by uneven age-group sizes, which may have may limited the power in the youngest cohort. Although altered gut microbiota levels can increase gut inflammation in rodent models of UC, a definitive cause–effect relationship between UC and intestinal microbiota alteration is difficult to demonstrate in humans.