Articles Posted in Traumatic Brain Injuries

Yesterday at the White House President Barack Obama hosted a special event designed to spotlight the dangers of concussions and traumatic brain injuries in youth sports. As someone who has worked and written on these issues for years it is inspiring to see them receiving this kind of attention at the presidential level.

Citing the Centers for Disease Control, the White House website notes that “kids and young adults make nearly 250,000 emergency room visits each year as a result of brain injuries from sport and recreation. And that doesn’t include visits that young people made to their family doctor, or those who don’t seek any help.”

To put these issues in the spotlight, Mr. Obama was introduced at the event by a teenage girl who suffered a concussion while playing soccer. The President told attendees that concussions “are not just a football issue. They don’t just affect grown men who choose to accept some risk to play a game they love and excel at. Every season, you’ve got boys and girls who are getting concussions in lacrosse and soccer and wrestling and ice hockey, as well as football.”

An announcement last week by New York’s University of Rochester received little attention in the national media, but deserves more. According to a news release from the university’s medical center, researchers there have made a significant breakthrough in the study of sports-related traumatic brain injuries, especially to children.

The medical center says the development of a new testing model “provides a foundation for scientists to better understand and potentially develop new ways to detect and prevent the repetitive sports injuries that can lead to the condition known as chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE).” The key to the research is the discovery “that mice with mild, repetitive traumatic brain injury (TBI) develop many of the same behavioral problems, such as difficulty sleeping, memory problems, depression, judgment and risk-taking issues, that have been associated with the issue in humans.”

As the news release goes on to explain, the lack of a reliable animal-based testing model has held back research on repetitive TBI and other sports injuries. If the model stands up to further peer-reviewed research it could, over time, prove to be crucial not only in the diagnosis and treatment of sports injuries but in developing new treatments, equipment and procedures to prevent them. The news release quotes one of the Medical Center’s doctors summarizing the importance of the findings: “While public awareness of the long-term health risk of blows to the head is growing rapidly, our ability to scientifically study the fundamental neurological impact of mild brain injuries has lagged.”

A story published last week in the Los Angeles Times spotlights both the help technology can offer in the fight against traumatic brain injuries, and the surprising resistance that such technology can, and does, encounter.

The paper reported on a “wireless alert system” that can be placed in football helmets. Sensors placed inside the helmet trigger an alert on a smartphone or a similar device carried by a coach or trainer on the sidelines if the wearer suffers a potentially concussion-inducing blow to the head. The system, according to the paper, “gains data from five sensors placed on a plastic-like, paper-thin lining placed on top of helmet padding. The sensors measure linear and rotational acceleration as well as the duration and location of a hit. A computer chip in the helmet transfers data to a hand-held alert monitor – typically carried by a trainer – via a low power signal similar to Bluetooth.” The system can be adjusted according to the level of play (middle school v high school v college).

One might have imagined that the main problem this raised for high schools was financial – the systems cost about $150 per unit. When one LA area high school offered the sensors to all 120 of its football players earlier this year, however, only 20 stepped up to purchase them. What surprised even the school’s head athletic trainer, however, was the reason: according to the LA Times “parents worried about sons being pulled from games and missing playing time. Several said they dropped the sensor topic after their sons declined to wear one.” The trainer told the paper, “In the society we live in, the knowledge is there but the parents, I don’t know – it confused me.”

In a recent article in the New York Times Dr. Robert C. Cantu, a professor of neurosurgery at Boston University, issued a thoughtful, yet passionate, call for parents and school officials to rethink the way we approach youth sports here in the United States.

Writing that he meets with some 1,500 concussion patients each year, Dr. Cantu lays out the case for lowering the degree and intensity of contact that younger children experience across a range of sports. “In light of what we now know about concussions and the brains of children,” he writes, “many sports should be fine-tuned.” Dr. Cantu writes that children under 14 are fundamentally more vulnerable than older teenagers or adults. “A child’s brain and head are disproportionately large for the rest of the body,” he notes. “And a child’s weak neck cannot brace for a hit the way an adult’s can. (Think of a bobblehead doll.)”

He begins the piece by focusing on football, where he believes tackling should be eliminated for children under 14, but emphasizes that head trauma, concussions and brain injuries are all more common in other sports than is popularly believed. His piece goes on to propose rule changes in soccer, ice hockey, baseball, softball, field hockey and girls’ lacrosse – many of which are not activities most of us think of as contact sports.