Of the ex-table tennis players who were approached, 22 agreed to participate in the study (response rate 42%).
He is also no.1 in the Fed Ex table taking a stash of points into the final event, the Tour Championship, that mean he could still take the bounty finishing 29th in a 30-man field.
A first round of PCR with the primer pair "69 ex" (Table 1) produced a 735 bp fragment of AgAcp34A-1.
For amplification of AgAcp34A-2 and AgAcp34A-3 we used the primer pair "70 ex" (Table 1) that produced a 793 bp fragment, followed by a nested PCR with the primer pair "70 n" (Table 1) that produced a 685 bp fragment specific to both AgAcp34A-2 and AgAcp34A-3, but not to AgAcp34A-1.
The anaerobic threshold was significantly increased in both the MEx group and the Ex group (Table 3).
At the same time, an insignificant reduction in work was highlighted in the M group, in contrast with a significant increase of the same parameter in the MEx group and in the Ex group (Table 3).
In the breakdown of frequencies detailed in Table 1 it was found that 78.3% of the ex-elite table tennis players had varying signs of radiographic OA in their knee joints and in comparison, only 36.3% of the control group had signs of OA with correspondingly less advanced radiological signs of OA according the KL scale.
Inclusion criteria for the ex-elite table tennis players were the requirements to have participated in table tennis at the national level for a minimum duration of 10 years and, to be still playing table tennis at the non-professional level at least twice weekly.
The results of the WOMAC questionnaire assessed as a group mean difference showed that 68.2% of the ex-elite table tennis players reported symptoms of knee pain compared with only 27.3% of control group (p = 0.02) (Table 3).
However the results also found that the physical signs of knee OA did not transpire through to increased physical disability or knee stiffness in the ex-elite table tennis group as measured by the sub-scores in the WOMAC index.
Comparisons between the ex-elite table tennis players and the control group were performed using the independent student t-test for continuous variables and categorical data were examined using the Chi-Square Test.
