New Ulm goalie Ava Brennan
The New Ulm Eagles girls’ hockey team got put in a tough situation Saturday before its Section 2A championship game against Mound-Westonka when starting goalie Ava Brennan — who had started all 19 games before the title game — was scratched due to a concussion.
That meant that Brooke Gramentz, who had played only 17 minutes (or one period the entire year), had to make the start.
“I thought that the girls battled hard and made the most of the opportunity,” New Ulm coach Kristin Faber said as the Eagles lost 8-2 to finish 16-4 (the same record as the Eagles boys’ hockey team). “And Brooke did a heck of a job in the nets. Overall pleased with the effort but obviously not the results you want in a section final game but I was proud of the girls to the way that we responded.”
Faber said that Gramentz’s 17 minutes played before her unscheduled start were not high pressured.
“I think that the 17 minutes she played were against Waseca and she saw maybe two shots (both saves),” Faber said.
On Saturday, Gramentz faced 41 shots and made 33 saves against the top seed in the section and the fifth-ranked Class A team in the state.
“It was a big change of pace for her and she made some unbelievable saves for us and a couple of those shots I do not know if there was a goalie in the state of Minnesota that would have made them. Overall it should be a confidence-builder for her for next year. I was glad in the way that she responded in the situation she was put in.”
New Ulm may have been leg-weary for the Mound game as their game against Delano two days before went two overtimes in a 3-2 win.
“That game did take a lot out of the girls,” Faber said. “Delano and Mound both had byes in their first round games. We had a lot of hockey in the span of five days but the girls played hard to the end of the game. A lot of heart shown and a lot of hard work went into it.”
And New Ulm could well be back in the section title game again next season as they graduate just two seniors in McKenna Strong and Morgan Klein.
“We have a lot of our scoring back and both of our goalies back,” Faber said. “We will get stronger and develop more over the off-season. And we have some players coming up from the JV who could help.”
Faber thinks that playing tougher competition would improve the team.
“The games we played against tougher teams were our most complete games and played the best in,” Faber said. “So hopefully next year we can get all of our nonconference games in.”
Goalie Scratch Was A Tough One For New Ulm
https://www.nujournal.com/sports/local- ... r-new-ulm/
Mound-Westonka 8 Eagles 2
After the long, tough battle at Delano Thursday night, the Eagles met a very good White Hawks team at Thaler Arena in Mound on Saturday. Regular goalie, Ava Brennen, had a concussion and couldn’t play, putting Brooke Gramentz in the net for her only full game this season. The White Hawks peppered Gramentz with 41 shots and she made 33 saves.
Strong and Helget score in Eagles girls final hockey game
Read more: https://www.sleepyeyenews.com/story/spo ... 989374002/
concussions
Moderators: Mitch Hawker, east hockey, karl(east)
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greybeard58
- Posts: 2511
- Joined: Sat Aug 21, 2004 11:40 pm
Molly Black concussion
Molly Black concussion
It's hard to believe that at one point in her career senior goaltender Molly Black didn't call in between the pipes home. The fixture in the net at Devils Lake, who has picked up over 4,400 saves, a 0.900 career save percentage, and tons of accolades for her performance in net wasn't in the cage until she was almost a teenager.
Black has been on the ice since she was 3-years-old, first lacing up the skates in Bemidji, Minnesota before heading west to Devils Lake a few years later. For nine years, Black was attacking the net, but it wasn't until her 12U team was in need of a goaltender that her future in hockey took an unexpected turn.
"When our town started out the first 12U program, we really didn't have anyone to step in as goalie," Black said. "I was the most flexible one, so they just threw me into the net, I fell in love with it and here I am."
It takes a specific kind of person to stand in front of a piece of rubber but slung at you multiple times a night, and for Black, she was nervous at first, but she quickly fell in love with her job in between the pipes. In fact, it's come to a point where Black has enjoyed seeing more shots on net...like 60.
Five times this season, Black has been faced with over 50 shots, seeing the highest total come against Bismarck as she made 65 saves on 68 shots. While some goaltenders may stress about having to face a high number of shots, the more pucks Black has to stop, the more fun she's having.
"The Bismarck game where I faced 68 shots, that was just fun," Black said. "You just face one shot at a time and you just gotta have fun with it. That's all you can do."
From her first start in the Devils Lake High School program, it was evident that Black was something special. Her first time stepping out onto the ice in a Firebirds jersey was in the third period against Fargo North/South, which has been one of the most successful programs in the state. She would face 20 shots and stop all of them.
From behind the bench, Black's abilities to move from post to post and rebound control are part of what has made her such a dependable in the net. Even in the Firebirds' final game of the season against Grand Forks, Black was on top of almost every loose puck around the paint.
"Her ability to move side to side so quickly and gobble up loose rebounds is what makes her so special," Firebirds head coach Rob McIvor said. "She has a great ability to just keep the puck in front of her."
One of the reasons why Black's game has become so strong is because she never takes a day off. In the summer or the off-season, she's at camps around the upper midwest, trying to improve her craft. She's at Burdick Arena an hour and a half before games, warming up as soon as she walks through the doors.
Even after games, when the entire team is back in the locker room, she spends a few minutes stretching out on the ice to maintain the thing that put her in net in the first place: her flexibility. Black said that since she started goaltending, she's looked for ways to be even more flexible, which has also helped with her ability to stay in the net.
Devils Lake fell to Grand Forks, 5-0, on Feb. 8 at Burdick Arena.
"Being flexible has definitely helped with injury prevention," Black said. "I've only missed one game in all of my six years, and that was because of a concussion, which isn't something I could really help."
Black's almost perfect attendance on the ice has been huge for the Firebirds, especially last season. Devils Lake had its strongest finish in program history during the 2019-20 season, where Black played a major role in getting their Firebirds to their first state tournament. Black led the goaltending effort while then seniors Elle Black (Molly's sister) and Kaylie Klemetsrud, then eighth grader Ashlyn Abrahamson and then sophomore Abbey Reule, would lead the scoring effort.
The Firebirds' charge to state was highlighted by a 2-1 quadruple overtime win over Grand Forks, where 49 saves from Black and a goal from then-senior defenseman Haylee Carlson would keep the dream alive for another day. It's a game and a memory that is still cherished to this day, by both teams.
After Thursday's game, Grand Forks goaltender Kaylee Baker would come back onto the ice while friends and family were celebrating with the Firebirds three seniors to congratulate Black and take some pictures with her. Black's mom would post the photo on Facebook with the hashtag "#4OTGOALIES".
"We won our first game at state in a four-overtime thriller and she let in only one goal," McIvor said. "It's impressive how well she's done at the high school level and I can only assume she's getting more offers coming in for the college level. I've said nothing about great praises about how she plays and the kind of kid she is."
It's uncommon to see a goaltender wearing a "C". There's no real reason why it's uncommon, but it just is. The last time a goaltender wore the "C' at the professional level was 11 years ago. However, to her coaches and her teammates, Black has always done as much as she can to help her teammates. Early in the season when the Firebirds were trying to up their communicative effort on the ice, Black was in the net talking to the defensemen to get things started.
One of her biggest efforts she making is helping eighth grader goaltender Deborah Clay and freshman goaltender Mathea Nelson step into a varsity starting role when she is gone. She's been working specifically in Wednesday practices with them and McIvor suspects that she'll be back in the rink next season to help progression Clay and Nelson's game. It's what she wants to do in order to give back to the community she's loved so much.
"My coach Chris once said do everything you can to give back to your community that raised you, so I really hope I can come back and be more of a goalie coach and a mentor to them," Black said. "This community is awesome. You can't ask for a better community. Even tonight, the crowd went wild when they talked about our senior accomplishments."
Black is a competitor, but she's always valued having fun while she's out on the ice. It's an attribute to her success that many might not think of. There have been a few games this season where the score has been lopsided in favor of the Firebirds opponent, but Black said it's about making the best of every moment to keep pushing forward. It's been something that's been elevating Black mentally and on the stat sheet since she entered the program.
"If you make one good save, you've just got to make the most of that," Black said. "If you let in three bad goals, don't focus on that. Focus on the funny joke your teammate said or something like that."
As for the future, Black knows she wants to play hockey at the college level, but she really isn't concerned about where it is, she just wants to play. It's been that way since she was 3-years-old. She loves the game and just so happened to find success, leaving Burdick Arena as one of the most successful hockey players in Devils Lake history.
"This means everything to me," Black said. "This is my favorite place to be."
Mol The Wall: For six seasons, Molly Black has been a cornerstone in the success of Devils Lake girls hockey
Read more: https://www.devilslakejournal.com/story ... 503379001/
It's hard to believe that at one point in her career senior goaltender Molly Black didn't call in between the pipes home. The fixture in the net at Devils Lake, who has picked up over 4,400 saves, a 0.900 career save percentage, and tons of accolades for her performance in net wasn't in the cage until she was almost a teenager.
Black has been on the ice since she was 3-years-old, first lacing up the skates in Bemidji, Minnesota before heading west to Devils Lake a few years later. For nine years, Black was attacking the net, but it wasn't until her 12U team was in need of a goaltender that her future in hockey took an unexpected turn.
"When our town started out the first 12U program, we really didn't have anyone to step in as goalie," Black said. "I was the most flexible one, so they just threw me into the net, I fell in love with it and here I am."
It takes a specific kind of person to stand in front of a piece of rubber but slung at you multiple times a night, and for Black, she was nervous at first, but she quickly fell in love with her job in between the pipes. In fact, it's come to a point where Black has enjoyed seeing more shots on net...like 60.
Five times this season, Black has been faced with over 50 shots, seeing the highest total come against Bismarck as she made 65 saves on 68 shots. While some goaltenders may stress about having to face a high number of shots, the more pucks Black has to stop, the more fun she's having.
"The Bismarck game where I faced 68 shots, that was just fun," Black said. "You just face one shot at a time and you just gotta have fun with it. That's all you can do."
From her first start in the Devils Lake High School program, it was evident that Black was something special. Her first time stepping out onto the ice in a Firebirds jersey was in the third period against Fargo North/South, which has been one of the most successful programs in the state. She would face 20 shots and stop all of them.
From behind the bench, Black's abilities to move from post to post and rebound control are part of what has made her such a dependable in the net. Even in the Firebirds' final game of the season against Grand Forks, Black was on top of almost every loose puck around the paint.
"Her ability to move side to side so quickly and gobble up loose rebounds is what makes her so special," Firebirds head coach Rob McIvor said. "She has a great ability to just keep the puck in front of her."
One of the reasons why Black's game has become so strong is because she never takes a day off. In the summer or the off-season, she's at camps around the upper midwest, trying to improve her craft. She's at Burdick Arena an hour and a half before games, warming up as soon as she walks through the doors.
Even after games, when the entire team is back in the locker room, she spends a few minutes stretching out on the ice to maintain the thing that put her in net in the first place: her flexibility. Black said that since she started goaltending, she's looked for ways to be even more flexible, which has also helped with her ability to stay in the net.
Devils Lake fell to Grand Forks, 5-0, on Feb. 8 at Burdick Arena.
"Being flexible has definitely helped with injury prevention," Black said. "I've only missed one game in all of my six years, and that was because of a concussion, which isn't something I could really help."
Black's almost perfect attendance on the ice has been huge for the Firebirds, especially last season. Devils Lake had its strongest finish in program history during the 2019-20 season, where Black played a major role in getting their Firebirds to their first state tournament. Black led the goaltending effort while then seniors Elle Black (Molly's sister) and Kaylie Klemetsrud, then eighth grader Ashlyn Abrahamson and then sophomore Abbey Reule, would lead the scoring effort.
The Firebirds' charge to state was highlighted by a 2-1 quadruple overtime win over Grand Forks, where 49 saves from Black and a goal from then-senior defenseman Haylee Carlson would keep the dream alive for another day. It's a game and a memory that is still cherished to this day, by both teams.
After Thursday's game, Grand Forks goaltender Kaylee Baker would come back onto the ice while friends and family were celebrating with the Firebirds three seniors to congratulate Black and take some pictures with her. Black's mom would post the photo on Facebook with the hashtag "#4OTGOALIES".
"We won our first game at state in a four-overtime thriller and she let in only one goal," McIvor said. "It's impressive how well she's done at the high school level and I can only assume she's getting more offers coming in for the college level. I've said nothing about great praises about how she plays and the kind of kid she is."
It's uncommon to see a goaltender wearing a "C". There's no real reason why it's uncommon, but it just is. The last time a goaltender wore the "C' at the professional level was 11 years ago. However, to her coaches and her teammates, Black has always done as much as she can to help her teammates. Early in the season when the Firebirds were trying to up their communicative effort on the ice, Black was in the net talking to the defensemen to get things started.
One of her biggest efforts she making is helping eighth grader goaltender Deborah Clay and freshman goaltender Mathea Nelson step into a varsity starting role when she is gone. She's been working specifically in Wednesday practices with them and McIvor suspects that she'll be back in the rink next season to help progression Clay and Nelson's game. It's what she wants to do in order to give back to the community she's loved so much.
"My coach Chris once said do everything you can to give back to your community that raised you, so I really hope I can come back and be more of a goalie coach and a mentor to them," Black said. "This community is awesome. You can't ask for a better community. Even tonight, the crowd went wild when they talked about our senior accomplishments."
Black is a competitor, but she's always valued having fun while she's out on the ice. It's an attribute to her success that many might not think of. There have been a few games this season where the score has been lopsided in favor of the Firebirds opponent, but Black said it's about making the best of every moment to keep pushing forward. It's been something that's been elevating Black mentally and on the stat sheet since she entered the program.
"If you make one good save, you've just got to make the most of that," Black said. "If you let in three bad goals, don't focus on that. Focus on the funny joke your teammate said or something like that."
As for the future, Black knows she wants to play hockey at the college level, but she really isn't concerned about where it is, she just wants to play. It's been that way since she was 3-years-old. She loves the game and just so happened to find success, leaving Burdick Arena as one of the most successful hockey players in Devils Lake history.
"This means everything to me," Black said. "This is my favorite place to be."
Mol The Wall: For six seasons, Molly Black has been a cornerstone in the success of Devils Lake girls hockey
Read more: https://www.devilslakejournal.com/story ... 503379001/
-
greybeard58
- Posts: 2511
- Joined: Sat Aug 21, 2004 11:40 pm
New study from Mayo Clinic: Subconcussive brain vital signs changes predict head-impact exposure in ice hockey players.
New study from Mayo Clinic: Subconcussive brain vital signs changes predict head-impact exposure in ice hockey players.
New study from Mayo Clinic: Subconcussive brain vital signs changes predict head-impact exposure in ice hockey players.
As expressed by Nauman and Talavage, it is increasingly important that the general understanding of concussion shifts from a singular acute-injury model to a spectrum of head-impact exposure and related outcomes. Objective measures of brain function can more accurately assess subtle changes along this spectrum. Brain vital signs were sensitive to the effects of repetitive subconcussive impacts in Bantam and Junior-A ice hockey players across a season, specifically detecting significant changes both within and between groups that were directly related to the number of impacts. Observed changes in the N400 represent more complex mechanisms in cognitive speech processing that should be explored further. The findings expand upon previous work by linking brain vital signs changes over time to the extent of exposure to head impacts.
The total number of impacts received by each player was calculated at the end of the season from the output of the respective accelerometer systems. Head impacts were recorded during games using the Triax SIM-G (Triax Technologies Inc., Norwalk, CT, USA) systems for Bantam players and the X-Patch (Prevent Biometrics, Edina, MN, USA) for Junior-A players. Given the different head impact systems, only the number of head impacts per player were analysed to allow for comparisons across groups.
Future studies will expand the scope to include both male and female players from a range of sports.
Subconcussive brain vital signs changes predict head-impact exposure in ice hockey players
https://academic.oup.com/braincomms/art ... 19/6211110
New study from Mayo Clinic: Subconcussive brain vital signs changes predict head-impact exposure in ice hockey players.
As expressed by Nauman and Talavage, it is increasingly important that the general understanding of concussion shifts from a singular acute-injury model to a spectrum of head-impact exposure and related outcomes. Objective measures of brain function can more accurately assess subtle changes along this spectrum. Brain vital signs were sensitive to the effects of repetitive subconcussive impacts in Bantam and Junior-A ice hockey players across a season, specifically detecting significant changes both within and between groups that were directly related to the number of impacts. Observed changes in the N400 represent more complex mechanisms in cognitive speech processing that should be explored further. The findings expand upon previous work by linking brain vital signs changes over time to the extent of exposure to head impacts.
The total number of impacts received by each player was calculated at the end of the season from the output of the respective accelerometer systems. Head impacts were recorded during games using the Triax SIM-G (Triax Technologies Inc., Norwalk, CT, USA) systems for Bantam players and the X-Patch (Prevent Biometrics, Edina, MN, USA) for Junior-A players. Given the different head impact systems, only the number of head impacts per player were analysed to allow for comparisons across groups.
Future studies will expand the scope to include both male and female players from a range of sports.
Subconcussive brain vital signs changes predict head-impact exposure in ice hockey players
https://academic.oup.com/braincomms/art ... 19/6211110
-
greybeard58
- Posts: 2511
- Joined: Sat Aug 21, 2004 11:40 pm
Why helmets don't prevent concussions — and what might
David Camarillo·TEDxStanford
Why helmets don't prevent concussions — and what might
Details
Transcript
Reading List
Footnotes
What is a concussion? Probably not what you think it is. In this talk from the cutting edge of research, bioengineer (and former football player) David Camarillo shows what really happens during a concussion -- and why standard sports helmets don't prevent it. Here's what the future of concussion prevention looks like.
This talk was presented to a local audience at TEDxStanford, an independent event. TED's editors chose to feature it for you.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
David Camarillo · Bioengineer
David Camarillo's research focuses on understanding and preventing traumatic brain injury.
ABOUT TEDX
TEDx was created in the spirit of TED’s mission, “ideas worth spreading.” It supports independent organizers who want to create a TED-like event in their own community.
Link:https://www.ted.com/talks/david_camaril ... what_might
Transcript
The word concussion evokes a fear these days more so than it ever has, and I know this personally. I played 10 years of football, was struck in the head thousands of times. And I have to tell you, though, what was much worse than that was a pair of bike accidents I had where I suffered concussions, and I'm still dealing with the effects of the most recent one today as I stand in front of you.
00:31
There is a fear around concussion that does have some evidence behind it. There is information that a repeated history of concussion can lead to early dementia, such as Alzheimer's, and chronic traumatic encephalopathy. That was the subject of the Will Smith movie "Concussion." And so everybody is caught up in football and what they see in the military, but you may not know that bike riding is the leading cause of concussion for kids, sports-related concussion, that is. And so another thing that I should tell you that you may not know is that the helmets that are worn in bicycling and football and many activities, they're not designed or tested for how well they can protect your children against concussion. They're in fact designed and tested for their ability to protect against skull fracture.
01:23
And so I get this question all the time from parents, and they ask me, "Would you let your own child play football?" Or, "Should I let my child play soccer?" And I think that as a field, we're a long way from giving an answer with any kind of confidence there.
01:44
So I look at that question from a bit of a different lens, and I want to know, how can we prevent concussion? Is that even possible? And most experts think that it's not, but the work that we're doing in my lab is starting to reveal more of the details around concussion so that we can have a better understanding. The reason we're able to prevent skull fracture with helmets is because it's pretty simple. We know how it works. Concussion has been much more of a mystery.
02:15
So to give you a sense of what might be happening in a concussion, I want to show you the video here that you see when you type into Google, "What is a concussion?" The CDC website comes up, and this video essentially tells the whole story. What you see is the head moves forward, the brain lags behind, then the brain catches up and smashes into the skull. It rebounds off the skull and then proceeds to run into the other side of the skull. And what you'll notice is highlighted in this video from the CDC, which I'll note was funded by the NFL, is that the outer surface of the brain, where it was to have smashed into the skull, looks like it's been damaged or injured, so it's on the outer surface of the brain. And what I'd like to do with this video is to tell you that there are some aspects that are probably right, indicative of what the scientists think happens with concussion, but there's probably more that's wrong with this video.
03:14
So one thing that I do agree with, and I think most experts would, is that the brain does have these dynamics. It does lag behind the skull and then catch up and move back and forth and oscillate. That we think is true. However, the amount of motion you see in the brain in this video is probably not right at all. There's very little room in the cranial vault, only a few millimeters, and it's filled entirely with cerebral spinal fluid, which acts as a protective layer. And so the brain as a whole probably moves very little inside the skull.
03:48
The other problem with this video is that the brain is shown as a kind of rigid whole as it moves around, and that's not true either. Your brain is one of the softest substances in your body, and you can think of it kind of like jello. So as your head is moving back and forth, your brain is twisting and turning and contorting, and the tissue is getting stretched. And so most experts, I think, would agree that concussion is not likely to be something that's happening on this outer surface of the brain, but rather it's something that's much deeper towards the center of the brain.
04:22
Now, the way that we're approaching this problem to try to understand the mechanisms of concussion and to figure out if we can prevent it is we are using a device like this. It's a mouthguard. It has sensors in it that are essentially the same that are in your cell phone: accelerometers, gyroscopes, and when someone is struck in the head, it can tell you how their head moved at a thousand samples per second. The principle behind the mouthguard is this: it fits onto your teeth. Your teeth are one of the hardest substances in your body. So it rigidly couples to your skull and gives you the most precise possible measurement of how the skull moves. People have tried other approaches, with helmets. We've looked at other sensors that go on your skin, and they all simply move around too much, and so we found that this is the only reliable way to take a good measurement.
05:18
So now that we've got this device, we can go beyond studying cadavers, because you can only learn so much about concussion from studying a cadaver, and we want to learn and study live humans. So where can we find a group of willing volunteers to go out and smash their heads into each other on a regular basis and sustain concussion? Well, I was one of them, and it's your local friendly Stanford football team.
05:45
So this is our laboratory, and I want to show you the first concussion we measured with this device. One of the things that I should point out is the device has this gyroscope in it, and that allows you to measure the rotation of the head. Most experts think that that's the critical factor that might start to tell us what is happening in concussion. So please watch this video.
06:06
Announcer: Cougars bring extra people late, but Luck has time, and Winslow is crushed. I hope he's all right.
06:15
(Audience roars)
06:22
Top of your screen, you'll see him come on just this little post route, get separation, safety. Here it comes at you in real speed. You'll hear this. The hit delivered by --
06:39
David Camarillo: Sorry, three times is probably a little excessive there. But you get the idea.
06:43
So when you look at just the film here, pretty much the only thing you can see is he got hit really hard and he was hurt. But when we extract the data out of the mouthguard that he was wearing, we can see much more detail, much richer information. And one of the things that we noticed here is that he was struck in the lower left side of his face mask. And so that did something first that was a little counterintuitive. His head did not move to the right. In fact, it rotated first to the left. Then as the neck began to compress, the force of the blow caused it to whip back to the right. So this left-right motion was sort of a whiplash-type phenomenon, and we think that is probably what led to the brain injury.
07:26
Now, this device is only limited in such that it can measure the skull motion, but what we really want to know is what's happening inside of the brain. So we collaborate with Svein Kleiven's group in Sweden. They've developed a finite element model of the brain. And so this is a simulation using the data from our mouthguard from the injury I just showed you, and what you see is the brain -- this is a cross-section right in the front of the brain twisting and contorting as I mentioned. So you can see this doesn't look a lot like the CDC video. Now, the colors that you're looking at are how much the brain tissue is being stretched. And so the red is 50 percent. That means the brain has been stretched to 50 percent of its original length, the tissue in that particular area.
08:10
And the main thing I want to draw your attention to is this red spot. So the red spot is very close to the center of the brain, and relatively speaking, you don't see a lot of colors like that on the exterior surface as the CDC video showed.
08:26
Now, to explain a little more detail about how we think concussion might be happening, one thing I should mention is that we and others have observed that a concussion is more likely when you're struck and your head rotates in this direction. This is more common in sports like football, but this seems to be more dangerous. So what might be happening there? Well, one thing that you'll notice in the human brain that is different than other animals is we have these two very large lobes. We have the right brain and the left brain. And the key thing to notice in this figure here is that right down the center of the right brain and the left brain there's a large fissure that goes deep into the brain. And in that fissure, what you can't see in this image, you'll have to trust me, there is a fibrous sheet of tissue. It's called the falx, and it runs from the front of your head all the way to the back of your head, and it's quite stiff. And so what that allows for is when you're struck and your head rotates in this left-right direction, forces can rapidly transmit right down to the center of your brain.
09:27
Now, what's there at the bottom of this fissure? It's the wiring of your brain, and in fact this red bundle here at the bottom of that fissure is the single largest fiber bundle that is the wiring that connects the right and left sides of your brain. It's called the corpus callosum. And we think that this might be one of the most common mechanisms of concussion, and as the forces move down, they strike the corpus callosum, it causes a dissociation between your right and your left brain and could explain some of the symptoms of concussion.
10:04
This finding is also consistent of what we've seen in this brain disease that I mentioned, chronic traumatic encephalopathy. So this is an image of a middle-aged ex-professional football player, and the thing that I want to point out is if you look at the corpus callosum, and I'll page back here so you can see the size of a normal corpus callosum and the size of the person here who has chronic traumatic encephalopathy, it is greatly atrophied. And the same goes for all of the space in the ventricles. These ventricles are much larger. And so all of this tissue near the center of the brain has died off over time. So what we're learning is indeed consistent.
10:45
Now, there is some good news here, and I hope to give you a sense of hope by the end of this talk. One of the things that we've noticed, specifically about this mechanism of injury, is although there's a rapid transmission of the forces down this fissure, it still takes a defined amount of time. And what we think is that if we can slow the head down just enough so that the brain does not lag behind the skull but instead it moves in synchrony with the skull, then we might be able to prevent this mechanism of concussion.
11:17
So how can we slow the head down?
11:22
(Laughter)
11:23
A gigantic helmet. So with more space, you have more time, and this is a bit of a joke, but some of you may have seen this. This is bubble soccer, and it's a real sport. In fact, I saw some young adults playing this sport down the street from my house the other day, and as far as I know there have been no reported concussions.
11:42
(Laughter)
11:43
But in all seriousness, this principle does work, but this has gone too far. This isn't something that's practical for bike riding or playing football. And so we are collaborating with a company in Sweden called Hövding. Some of you may have seen their work, and they're using the same principle of air to give you some extra space to prevent concussion. Kids, don't try this at home please. This stuntman does not have a helmet. He instead has a neck collar, and this neck collar has sensors in it, the same type of sensors that are in our mouthguard, and it detects when he's likely to have a fall, and there's an airbag that explodes and triggers, the same way that an airbag works in your car, essentially. And in the experiments we've done in my lab with their device, we found that it can greatly reduce the risk of concussion in some scenarios compared to a normal bicycle helmet. So it's a pretty exciting development.
12:45
But in order for us to actually realize the benefits of technology that can prevent concussion, it needs to meet regulations. That's a reality. And this device is for sale in Europe but is not for sale in the US, and probably won't be any time soon. So I wanted to tell you why. There are some good reasons and then there are some not so good reasons.
13:08
Bike helmets are federally regulated. The Consumer Product Safety Commission has been given jurisdiction to approve any bike helmet for sale, and this is the test they use. This is back to what I was telling you at the beginning about skull fracture. That's what this test is for. And that's an important thing to do. It can save your life, but it's not sufficient, I would say. So for example, one thing this test doesn't evaluate is it doesn't tell you is that airbag going to trigger at the right time and place, and not trigger when it doesn't need to? Similarly, it's not going to tell you is this helmet likely to prevent concussion or not? And if you look at football helmets, which aren't regulated, they still have a very similar test. They're not regulated by the government, anyway. They have an industry body, which is the way most industries work. But this industry body, I can tell you, has been quite resistant to updating their standards. So in my lab, we are working on not only the mechanism of concussion, but we want to understand how can we have better test standards? And we hope that the government can use this type of information to encourage innovation by letting consumers know how protected are you with a given helmet.
14:17
And I want to bring this back finally to the original question I asked, which is, would I feel comfortable letting my child play football or ride a bicycle? And this might be just a result of my own traumatic experience. I'm much more nervous about my daughter, Rose, riding a bicycle. So she's a year and a half old, and she's already, well, wants to anyway, race down the streets of San Francisco. This is the bottom of one of these streets. And so my personal goal is to -- and I believe this is possible -- is to further develop these technologies, and in fact, we're working on something in my lab in particular that really makes optimal use of the given space of a helmet. And I am confident that we will be able to, before she's ready to ride a two-wheeler, have something available that can in fact really reduce the risk of concussion and comply with regulatory bodies.
15:10
And so what I'd like to do -- and I know that this is for some of you of more immediate nature, I've got a couple years here -- is to be able to tell parents and grandparents when I'm asked, it is safe and healthy for your children to engage in these activities. And I'm very fortunate to have a wonderful team at Stanford that's working hard on this.
15:30
So I hope to come back in a few years with the final story, but for now I will tell you, please don't just be afraid when you hear the word concussion. There is hope.
15:41
Thank you.
Reading List:
ARTICLE
"Sports-Related Concussions in Youth Improving the Science, Changing the Culture"
Institute of Medicine of the National Academies, 2013
This scientific report, commissioned by the Institute of Medicine, is written in a way that it is accessible to interested parents, coaches, and other non-scientist. The 332 page report is the most comprehensive resource on what we do and do not know about concussion. For the casual reader, the first 13 pages offer a succinct summary of their findings. Based on published research prior to this 2014 report, it is clear that there are more questions than answers, including inconclusive evidence that current helmets prevent against concussion.
BOOK
League of Denial
Mark Fainaru-Wada, Steve Fainaru
Crown Archetype, 2013
When this book was first published, I was expecting a drama on the legal saga of the NFL versus the player’s association. To the contrary, what I found was a spellbinding scientific mystery story on the discovery of brain damage in NFL players. I recommend this exposé to anyone with interest on science history and corporate meddling, similar to what has been seen in the tobacco and other industries.
WATCH
Concussion
Columbia Pictures, 2015
Will Smith plays Bennet Omalu,the Nigerian born county pathologist who first discovered brain damage in Mike Webster, a former Pittsburg Steeler. I am amazed that the NFL allowed use of its logo for this film since they are made out to be the evil empire. However, this story focuses more on the character Omalu rather than the comprehensive NFL cover-up detailed in League of Denial.
WATCH
League of Denial: The NFL's Concussion Crisis
"Frontline"
PBS
For those who would rather get straight into the scientific controversy of concussion in the NFL and avoid the personal stories of Mike Webster and Bennet Omalu, this 2 hour special is your best resource. Extremely well done, and controversial as ESPN’s support of this documentary was pulled at the last minute before it was aired.
ARTICLE
"Senseless"
Bruce Barcott
Bicycling, 2013
This excellent piece of investigative reporting digs into the federal regulation of bike helmets and implicates a 1994 law that has stymied safety innovation. Specifically, the author gathers evidence that helmet manufacturers have little incentive to design beyond the simple government pass-fail criteria for skull fracture. The Consumer Protection Safety Commission (CPSC) has been unable to improve the test standards since passage of the law because of an onerous cost-benefit requirement that is specific to the CPSC and does not apply to other agencies, such as the FDA.
ARTICLE
"Effective Concussion Treatment Remains Frustratingly Elusive, Despite a Booming Industry"
Barry Meier, Danielle Ivory
New York Times, 2015
A timely warning to consumers about snake oil on the market for concussion products. The author implies that sloppy science, irresponsible funding decisions by the Department of Defense, and lack of regulation have led to the current mess.
ARTICLE
"N.F.L. Suspends Use of Helmet Sensors"
Ken Belson,
New York Times, 2015
In February 2015, the NFL put it sensors program on hold. While the NFL has been criticized for this move, I agree with them that the sensors available at that time were insufficient to carry out a quality study.
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This is your brain on communication
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Footnotes us link:
https://www.ted.com/talks/david_camaril ... /footnotes
Why helmets don't prevent concussions — and what might
Details
Transcript
Reading List
Footnotes
What is a concussion? Probably not what you think it is. In this talk from the cutting edge of research, bioengineer (and former football player) David Camarillo shows what really happens during a concussion -- and why standard sports helmets don't prevent it. Here's what the future of concussion prevention looks like.
This talk was presented to a local audience at TEDxStanford, an independent event. TED's editors chose to feature it for you.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
David Camarillo · Bioengineer
David Camarillo's research focuses on understanding and preventing traumatic brain injury.
ABOUT TEDX
TEDx was created in the spirit of TED’s mission, “ideas worth spreading.” It supports independent organizers who want to create a TED-like event in their own community.
Link:https://www.ted.com/talks/david_camaril ... what_might
Transcript
The word concussion evokes a fear these days more so than it ever has, and I know this personally. I played 10 years of football, was struck in the head thousands of times. And I have to tell you, though, what was much worse than that was a pair of bike accidents I had where I suffered concussions, and I'm still dealing with the effects of the most recent one today as I stand in front of you.
00:31
There is a fear around concussion that does have some evidence behind it. There is information that a repeated history of concussion can lead to early dementia, such as Alzheimer's, and chronic traumatic encephalopathy. That was the subject of the Will Smith movie "Concussion." And so everybody is caught up in football and what they see in the military, but you may not know that bike riding is the leading cause of concussion for kids, sports-related concussion, that is. And so another thing that I should tell you that you may not know is that the helmets that are worn in bicycling and football and many activities, they're not designed or tested for how well they can protect your children against concussion. They're in fact designed and tested for their ability to protect against skull fracture.
01:23
And so I get this question all the time from parents, and they ask me, "Would you let your own child play football?" Or, "Should I let my child play soccer?" And I think that as a field, we're a long way from giving an answer with any kind of confidence there.
01:44
So I look at that question from a bit of a different lens, and I want to know, how can we prevent concussion? Is that even possible? And most experts think that it's not, but the work that we're doing in my lab is starting to reveal more of the details around concussion so that we can have a better understanding. The reason we're able to prevent skull fracture with helmets is because it's pretty simple. We know how it works. Concussion has been much more of a mystery.
02:15
So to give you a sense of what might be happening in a concussion, I want to show you the video here that you see when you type into Google, "What is a concussion?" The CDC website comes up, and this video essentially tells the whole story. What you see is the head moves forward, the brain lags behind, then the brain catches up and smashes into the skull. It rebounds off the skull and then proceeds to run into the other side of the skull. And what you'll notice is highlighted in this video from the CDC, which I'll note was funded by the NFL, is that the outer surface of the brain, where it was to have smashed into the skull, looks like it's been damaged or injured, so it's on the outer surface of the brain. And what I'd like to do with this video is to tell you that there are some aspects that are probably right, indicative of what the scientists think happens with concussion, but there's probably more that's wrong with this video.
03:14
So one thing that I do agree with, and I think most experts would, is that the brain does have these dynamics. It does lag behind the skull and then catch up and move back and forth and oscillate. That we think is true. However, the amount of motion you see in the brain in this video is probably not right at all. There's very little room in the cranial vault, only a few millimeters, and it's filled entirely with cerebral spinal fluid, which acts as a protective layer. And so the brain as a whole probably moves very little inside the skull.
03:48
The other problem with this video is that the brain is shown as a kind of rigid whole as it moves around, and that's not true either. Your brain is one of the softest substances in your body, and you can think of it kind of like jello. So as your head is moving back and forth, your brain is twisting and turning and contorting, and the tissue is getting stretched. And so most experts, I think, would agree that concussion is not likely to be something that's happening on this outer surface of the brain, but rather it's something that's much deeper towards the center of the brain.
04:22
Now, the way that we're approaching this problem to try to understand the mechanisms of concussion and to figure out if we can prevent it is we are using a device like this. It's a mouthguard. It has sensors in it that are essentially the same that are in your cell phone: accelerometers, gyroscopes, and when someone is struck in the head, it can tell you how their head moved at a thousand samples per second. The principle behind the mouthguard is this: it fits onto your teeth. Your teeth are one of the hardest substances in your body. So it rigidly couples to your skull and gives you the most precise possible measurement of how the skull moves. People have tried other approaches, with helmets. We've looked at other sensors that go on your skin, and they all simply move around too much, and so we found that this is the only reliable way to take a good measurement.
05:18
So now that we've got this device, we can go beyond studying cadavers, because you can only learn so much about concussion from studying a cadaver, and we want to learn and study live humans. So where can we find a group of willing volunteers to go out and smash their heads into each other on a regular basis and sustain concussion? Well, I was one of them, and it's your local friendly Stanford football team.
05:45
So this is our laboratory, and I want to show you the first concussion we measured with this device. One of the things that I should point out is the device has this gyroscope in it, and that allows you to measure the rotation of the head. Most experts think that that's the critical factor that might start to tell us what is happening in concussion. So please watch this video.
06:06
Announcer: Cougars bring extra people late, but Luck has time, and Winslow is crushed. I hope he's all right.
06:15
(Audience roars)
06:22
Top of your screen, you'll see him come on just this little post route, get separation, safety. Here it comes at you in real speed. You'll hear this. The hit delivered by --
06:39
David Camarillo: Sorry, three times is probably a little excessive there. But you get the idea.
06:43
So when you look at just the film here, pretty much the only thing you can see is he got hit really hard and he was hurt. But when we extract the data out of the mouthguard that he was wearing, we can see much more detail, much richer information. And one of the things that we noticed here is that he was struck in the lower left side of his face mask. And so that did something first that was a little counterintuitive. His head did not move to the right. In fact, it rotated first to the left. Then as the neck began to compress, the force of the blow caused it to whip back to the right. So this left-right motion was sort of a whiplash-type phenomenon, and we think that is probably what led to the brain injury.
07:26
Now, this device is only limited in such that it can measure the skull motion, but what we really want to know is what's happening inside of the brain. So we collaborate with Svein Kleiven's group in Sweden. They've developed a finite element model of the brain. And so this is a simulation using the data from our mouthguard from the injury I just showed you, and what you see is the brain -- this is a cross-section right in the front of the brain twisting and contorting as I mentioned. So you can see this doesn't look a lot like the CDC video. Now, the colors that you're looking at are how much the brain tissue is being stretched. And so the red is 50 percent. That means the brain has been stretched to 50 percent of its original length, the tissue in that particular area.
08:10
And the main thing I want to draw your attention to is this red spot. So the red spot is very close to the center of the brain, and relatively speaking, you don't see a lot of colors like that on the exterior surface as the CDC video showed.
08:26
Now, to explain a little more detail about how we think concussion might be happening, one thing I should mention is that we and others have observed that a concussion is more likely when you're struck and your head rotates in this direction. This is more common in sports like football, but this seems to be more dangerous. So what might be happening there? Well, one thing that you'll notice in the human brain that is different than other animals is we have these two very large lobes. We have the right brain and the left brain. And the key thing to notice in this figure here is that right down the center of the right brain and the left brain there's a large fissure that goes deep into the brain. And in that fissure, what you can't see in this image, you'll have to trust me, there is a fibrous sheet of tissue. It's called the falx, and it runs from the front of your head all the way to the back of your head, and it's quite stiff. And so what that allows for is when you're struck and your head rotates in this left-right direction, forces can rapidly transmit right down to the center of your brain.
09:27
Now, what's there at the bottom of this fissure? It's the wiring of your brain, and in fact this red bundle here at the bottom of that fissure is the single largest fiber bundle that is the wiring that connects the right and left sides of your brain. It's called the corpus callosum. And we think that this might be one of the most common mechanisms of concussion, and as the forces move down, they strike the corpus callosum, it causes a dissociation between your right and your left brain and could explain some of the symptoms of concussion.
10:04
This finding is also consistent of what we've seen in this brain disease that I mentioned, chronic traumatic encephalopathy. So this is an image of a middle-aged ex-professional football player, and the thing that I want to point out is if you look at the corpus callosum, and I'll page back here so you can see the size of a normal corpus callosum and the size of the person here who has chronic traumatic encephalopathy, it is greatly atrophied. And the same goes for all of the space in the ventricles. These ventricles are much larger. And so all of this tissue near the center of the brain has died off over time. So what we're learning is indeed consistent.
10:45
Now, there is some good news here, and I hope to give you a sense of hope by the end of this talk. One of the things that we've noticed, specifically about this mechanism of injury, is although there's a rapid transmission of the forces down this fissure, it still takes a defined amount of time. And what we think is that if we can slow the head down just enough so that the brain does not lag behind the skull but instead it moves in synchrony with the skull, then we might be able to prevent this mechanism of concussion.
11:17
So how can we slow the head down?
11:22
(Laughter)
11:23
A gigantic helmet. So with more space, you have more time, and this is a bit of a joke, but some of you may have seen this. This is bubble soccer, and it's a real sport. In fact, I saw some young adults playing this sport down the street from my house the other day, and as far as I know there have been no reported concussions.
11:42
(Laughter)
11:43
But in all seriousness, this principle does work, but this has gone too far. This isn't something that's practical for bike riding or playing football. And so we are collaborating with a company in Sweden called Hövding. Some of you may have seen their work, and they're using the same principle of air to give you some extra space to prevent concussion. Kids, don't try this at home please. This stuntman does not have a helmet. He instead has a neck collar, and this neck collar has sensors in it, the same type of sensors that are in our mouthguard, and it detects when he's likely to have a fall, and there's an airbag that explodes and triggers, the same way that an airbag works in your car, essentially. And in the experiments we've done in my lab with their device, we found that it can greatly reduce the risk of concussion in some scenarios compared to a normal bicycle helmet. So it's a pretty exciting development.
12:45
But in order for us to actually realize the benefits of technology that can prevent concussion, it needs to meet regulations. That's a reality. And this device is for sale in Europe but is not for sale in the US, and probably won't be any time soon. So I wanted to tell you why. There are some good reasons and then there are some not so good reasons.
13:08
Bike helmets are federally regulated. The Consumer Product Safety Commission has been given jurisdiction to approve any bike helmet for sale, and this is the test they use. This is back to what I was telling you at the beginning about skull fracture. That's what this test is for. And that's an important thing to do. It can save your life, but it's not sufficient, I would say. So for example, one thing this test doesn't evaluate is it doesn't tell you is that airbag going to trigger at the right time and place, and not trigger when it doesn't need to? Similarly, it's not going to tell you is this helmet likely to prevent concussion or not? And if you look at football helmets, which aren't regulated, they still have a very similar test. They're not regulated by the government, anyway. They have an industry body, which is the way most industries work. But this industry body, I can tell you, has been quite resistant to updating their standards. So in my lab, we are working on not only the mechanism of concussion, but we want to understand how can we have better test standards? And we hope that the government can use this type of information to encourage innovation by letting consumers know how protected are you with a given helmet.
14:17
And I want to bring this back finally to the original question I asked, which is, would I feel comfortable letting my child play football or ride a bicycle? And this might be just a result of my own traumatic experience. I'm much more nervous about my daughter, Rose, riding a bicycle. So she's a year and a half old, and she's already, well, wants to anyway, race down the streets of San Francisco. This is the bottom of one of these streets. And so my personal goal is to -- and I believe this is possible -- is to further develop these technologies, and in fact, we're working on something in my lab in particular that really makes optimal use of the given space of a helmet. And I am confident that we will be able to, before she's ready to ride a two-wheeler, have something available that can in fact really reduce the risk of concussion and comply with regulatory bodies.
15:10
And so what I'd like to do -- and I know that this is for some of you of more immediate nature, I've got a couple years here -- is to be able to tell parents and grandparents when I'm asked, it is safe and healthy for your children to engage in these activities. And I'm very fortunate to have a wonderful team at Stanford that's working hard on this.
15:30
So I hope to come back in a few years with the final story, but for now I will tell you, please don't just be afraid when you hear the word concussion. There is hope.
15:41
Thank you.
Reading List:
ARTICLE
"Sports-Related Concussions in Youth Improving the Science, Changing the Culture"
Institute of Medicine of the National Academies, 2013
This scientific report, commissioned by the Institute of Medicine, is written in a way that it is accessible to interested parents, coaches, and other non-scientist. The 332 page report is the most comprehensive resource on what we do and do not know about concussion. For the casual reader, the first 13 pages offer a succinct summary of their findings. Based on published research prior to this 2014 report, it is clear that there are more questions than answers, including inconclusive evidence that current helmets prevent against concussion.
BOOK
League of Denial
Mark Fainaru-Wada, Steve Fainaru
Crown Archetype, 2013
When this book was first published, I was expecting a drama on the legal saga of the NFL versus the player’s association. To the contrary, what I found was a spellbinding scientific mystery story on the discovery of brain damage in NFL players. I recommend this exposé to anyone with interest on science history and corporate meddling, similar to what has been seen in the tobacco and other industries.
WATCH
Concussion
Columbia Pictures, 2015
Will Smith plays Bennet Omalu,the Nigerian born county pathologist who first discovered brain damage in Mike Webster, a former Pittsburg Steeler. I am amazed that the NFL allowed use of its logo for this film since they are made out to be the evil empire. However, this story focuses more on the character Omalu rather than the comprehensive NFL cover-up detailed in League of Denial.
WATCH
League of Denial: The NFL's Concussion Crisis
"Frontline"
PBS
For those who would rather get straight into the scientific controversy of concussion in the NFL and avoid the personal stories of Mike Webster and Bennet Omalu, this 2 hour special is your best resource. Extremely well done, and controversial as ESPN’s support of this documentary was pulled at the last minute before it was aired.
ARTICLE
"Senseless"
Bruce Barcott
Bicycling, 2013
This excellent piece of investigative reporting digs into the federal regulation of bike helmets and implicates a 1994 law that has stymied safety innovation. Specifically, the author gathers evidence that helmet manufacturers have little incentive to design beyond the simple government pass-fail criteria for skull fracture. The Consumer Protection Safety Commission (CPSC) has been unable to improve the test standards since passage of the law because of an onerous cost-benefit requirement that is specific to the CPSC and does not apply to other agencies, such as the FDA.
ARTICLE
"Effective Concussion Treatment Remains Frustratingly Elusive, Despite a Booming Industry"
Barry Meier, Danielle Ivory
New York Times, 2015
A timely warning to consumers about snake oil on the market for concussion products. The author implies that sloppy science, irresponsible funding decisions by the Department of Defense, and lack of regulation have led to the current mess.
ARTICLE
"N.F.L. Suspends Use of Helmet Sensors"
Ken Belson,
New York Times, 2015
In February 2015, the NFL put it sensors program on hold. While the NFL has been criticized for this move, I agree with them that the sensors available at that time were insufficient to carry out a quality study.
What inspires you?
Tell us your interests and we’ll pick TED Talks just for you.
Get Started
Watch next
This is your brain on communication
3.0M views
14:51
A new way to study the brain's invisible secrets
1.6M views
13:15
Protecting the brain against concussion
540k views
9:21
What happens when you have a concussion?
1.4M views
5:55
Can I have your brain? The quest for truth on concussions and CTE
1.2M views
11:20
How brain science will change computing
1.7M views
20:11
Footnotes us link:
https://www.ted.com/talks/david_camaril ... /footnotes
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- Joined: Sat Aug 21, 2004 11:40 pm
Kaylee Vader ready to hang up skates after lost time to concussion and cancellations
Kaylee Vader ready to hang up skates after lost time to concussion and cancellations
The Atlantic Athletic Collegiate Association announced university sports would once again be cancelled due to COVID-19 concerns on Dec. 2, 2020. The ACAA announced last summer there would be no fall semester sports but left hope in student-athletes that competition would make a comeback in the winter.
Men’s fourth-year basketball player Ian Watters said the news is disappointing but he wasn’t surprised after New Brunswick went back to the orange phase as part of its COVID-19 recovery plan.
“I was looking forward to the season after coming off of last year but at the same time, I understand,” Watters said. “The situation did get worse in New Brunswick and obviously it’s not worth compromising that in order to play basketball.”
Watters’ Tommies were a win away from reaching the ACAA finals in 2020 and would’ve had nearly every player coming back for the 2020-21 season. He said this years’ team had the potential to compete with the league’s top teams, such as last season’s champion, Mount Allison University.
“We were getting older and had a lot of leaders … you put a lot of work into this and to not be able to play your final year, it sucks,” he said.
The ACAA will allow teams to compete with one another during practice, depending on government health protocols. Watters had spent this school year in his hometown, Miramichi, where he hasn’t been practicing with his team but other teams have been.
Though Watters is in his fourth year, he will not lose a year of eligibility and will have a chance to come back to play ACAA basketball if he chooses to. Players are eligible for five seasons, giving fifth-year players a chance to come back. For Watters, the choice has yet to be made. But women’s hockey player Kaylee Vader knows her time as a Tommie has concluded.
Vader, from Alberta, said the plan has always been to get her degree and get back home. Hockey has taken a toll on her body, she said, having missed some time last season due to a concussion. But it didn’t make her decision any easier.
“I reached that point where I’m ready to hang up the skates,” Vader said.
Vader has been practicing with the women’s hockey team all year but she said it’s been hard to find motivation, where she didn’t know if she’d be able to play again. But her coaching staff was able to lift up the team by adding mini competitions and allowing the team to play music during practice every Thursday.
But Vader’s biggest motivation is knowing her teammates will play after this year.
“If I’m on the ice with girls that are coming back next year, I’m just trying to help them get better,” she said. “It’s the team mentality … even though I may not be coming back, those other girls are.”
Vader said she feels other graduating students feel the same as her and Watters when it comes to not getting one last shot at bringing a banner back to St. Thomas University. She was surprised, yet not shocked, and disappointed but understood. Players won’t get a chance to play in their “grad game,” which is their last home game of the season where graduating players are rewarded with a ceremony before or after the game.
Vader wasn’t able to play in her team’s final game last season, an elimination game against the University of New Brunswick, because she was concussed. She said if she could go back to let herself know it would be the last time she would look down and see the Tommies’ “T” on her chest, she would.
“I’ve spent the last four years trying to represent the “T” on the front. So it would have been one of those moments.”
Senior athletes disappointed but not surprised about no sports again
Read more: https://theaquinian.net/senior-athletes ... nce-again/
The Atlantic Athletic Collegiate Association announced university sports would once again be cancelled due to COVID-19 concerns on Dec. 2, 2020. The ACAA announced last summer there would be no fall semester sports but left hope in student-athletes that competition would make a comeback in the winter.
Men’s fourth-year basketball player Ian Watters said the news is disappointing but he wasn’t surprised after New Brunswick went back to the orange phase as part of its COVID-19 recovery plan.
“I was looking forward to the season after coming off of last year but at the same time, I understand,” Watters said. “The situation did get worse in New Brunswick and obviously it’s not worth compromising that in order to play basketball.”
Watters’ Tommies were a win away from reaching the ACAA finals in 2020 and would’ve had nearly every player coming back for the 2020-21 season. He said this years’ team had the potential to compete with the league’s top teams, such as last season’s champion, Mount Allison University.
“We were getting older and had a lot of leaders … you put a lot of work into this and to not be able to play your final year, it sucks,” he said.
The ACAA will allow teams to compete with one another during practice, depending on government health protocols. Watters had spent this school year in his hometown, Miramichi, where he hasn’t been practicing with his team but other teams have been.
Though Watters is in his fourth year, he will not lose a year of eligibility and will have a chance to come back to play ACAA basketball if he chooses to. Players are eligible for five seasons, giving fifth-year players a chance to come back. For Watters, the choice has yet to be made. But women’s hockey player Kaylee Vader knows her time as a Tommie has concluded.
Vader, from Alberta, said the plan has always been to get her degree and get back home. Hockey has taken a toll on her body, she said, having missed some time last season due to a concussion. But it didn’t make her decision any easier.
“I reached that point where I’m ready to hang up the skates,” Vader said.
Vader has been practicing with the women’s hockey team all year but she said it’s been hard to find motivation, where she didn’t know if she’d be able to play again. But her coaching staff was able to lift up the team by adding mini competitions and allowing the team to play music during practice every Thursday.
But Vader’s biggest motivation is knowing her teammates will play after this year.
“If I’m on the ice with girls that are coming back next year, I’m just trying to help them get better,” she said. “It’s the team mentality … even though I may not be coming back, those other girls are.”
Vader said she feels other graduating students feel the same as her and Watters when it comes to not getting one last shot at bringing a banner back to St. Thomas University. She was surprised, yet not shocked, and disappointed but understood. Players won’t get a chance to play in their “grad game,” which is their last home game of the season where graduating players are rewarded with a ceremony before or after the game.
Vader wasn’t able to play in her team’s final game last season, an elimination game against the University of New Brunswick, because she was concussed. She said if she could go back to let herself know it would be the last time she would look down and see the Tommies’ “T” on her chest, she would.
“I’ve spent the last four years trying to represent the “T” on the front. So it would have been one of those moments.”
Senior athletes disappointed but not surprised about no sports again
Read more: https://theaquinian.net/senior-athletes ... nce-again/
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greybeard58
- Posts: 2511
- Joined: Sat Aug 21, 2004 11:40 pm
Repetitive head impacts in youth hockey lead to significant changes in brain 'vital signs'
Repetitive head impacts in youth hockey lead to significant changes in brain 'vital signs'
Results of the latest phase of a multi-year hockey concussion study by SFU researchers, working with neuroscientists at Surrey’s Health and Technology District and the Mayo Clinic, have found significant brain “vital sign” changes in a pre-to-post season comparison across two youth player groups.
Researchers monitored the brain vital signs in 23 U.S.-based Bantam players (age 14 and under) and Junior A players (age 16-20) during pre- and post-game play. Brainwaves were measured at the rink using portable electroencephalography (EEG), which provided an objective evaluation of cognitive brain function.
In addition to changes in auditory sensation and cognitive processing, sub-concussive changes were significantly correlated with the number of head impacts over the season across both age groups.
A sub-concussive impact is a mechanical force transmitted to the brain below the threshold for a diagnosis of an acute concussive injury. The effects of these low-magnitude impacts may not even be noticeable to the player or to observers on the sidelines.
The study builds on initial 2019 results published in Brain: A Journal of Neurology that confirmed significant brain vital sign changes shortly after concussions were diagnosed in Junior A players.
The initial 2019 study results show that undetected impairments remained when players were cleared to return to play using current clinical concussion protocols. Notably, the initial study also reported sensitivity to sub-concussive impairments in those players who did not sustain a concussion diagnosis over the course of the season.
The current study's latest results with the addition of younger Bantam players have been published in Brain Communications.
New results show:
• Significant brain vital sign changes in specific auditory sensation and cognitive processing responses for the pre-to-post season comparison across both groups.
• Differences between the Bantam and Junior A ice hockey players showed more changes in the Junior A group.
• Importantly, the subconcussive changes were significantly correlated with the number of head impacts over the season across both age groups, and consequently showed more subconcussive changes in brain vital signs.
"Our research has shown that repetitive sub-concussive impacts triggered compounding effects in brain function changes," says study lead author Shaun Fickling, a recent SFU PhD biomedical engineering graduate. "This underscores the importance of shifting our thinking and understanding of concussions as a singular acute-injury model to a spectrum of head-impact exposure and effects over time."
SFU neuroscientist and professor Ryan D'Arcy, who collaborated on the research, says: "In medicine, you can't treat what you can't measure. With breakthroughs on measurement challenges, we hope to now accelerate treatment innovations for prevention, acute care and extended care concussion management – for all people across a range of different applications."
The study was funded in part by USA Hockey and co-led by researchers at the Health and Technology District in Surrey, and the Mayo Clinic Sports Centre in Rochester, Minnesota.
Repetitive head impacts in youth hockey lead to significant changes in brain 'vital signs’
Read more: http://www.sfu.ca/sfunews/stories/2021/ ... -chan.html
Results of the latest phase of a multi-year hockey concussion study by SFU researchers, working with neuroscientists at Surrey’s Health and Technology District and the Mayo Clinic, have found significant brain “vital sign” changes in a pre-to-post season comparison across two youth player groups.
Researchers monitored the brain vital signs in 23 U.S.-based Bantam players (age 14 and under) and Junior A players (age 16-20) during pre- and post-game play. Brainwaves were measured at the rink using portable electroencephalography (EEG), which provided an objective evaluation of cognitive brain function.
In addition to changes in auditory sensation and cognitive processing, sub-concussive changes were significantly correlated with the number of head impacts over the season across both age groups.
A sub-concussive impact is a mechanical force transmitted to the brain below the threshold for a diagnosis of an acute concussive injury. The effects of these low-magnitude impacts may not even be noticeable to the player or to observers on the sidelines.
The study builds on initial 2019 results published in Brain: A Journal of Neurology that confirmed significant brain vital sign changes shortly after concussions were diagnosed in Junior A players.
The initial 2019 study results show that undetected impairments remained when players were cleared to return to play using current clinical concussion protocols. Notably, the initial study also reported sensitivity to sub-concussive impairments in those players who did not sustain a concussion diagnosis over the course of the season.
The current study's latest results with the addition of younger Bantam players have been published in Brain Communications.
New results show:
• Significant brain vital sign changes in specific auditory sensation and cognitive processing responses for the pre-to-post season comparison across both groups.
• Differences between the Bantam and Junior A ice hockey players showed more changes in the Junior A group.
• Importantly, the subconcussive changes were significantly correlated with the number of head impacts over the season across both age groups, and consequently showed more subconcussive changes in brain vital signs.
"Our research has shown that repetitive sub-concussive impacts triggered compounding effects in brain function changes," says study lead author Shaun Fickling, a recent SFU PhD biomedical engineering graduate. "This underscores the importance of shifting our thinking and understanding of concussions as a singular acute-injury model to a spectrum of head-impact exposure and effects over time."
SFU neuroscientist and professor Ryan D'Arcy, who collaborated on the research, says: "In medicine, you can't treat what you can't measure. With breakthroughs on measurement challenges, we hope to now accelerate treatment innovations for prevention, acute care and extended care concussion management – for all people across a range of different applications."
The study was funded in part by USA Hockey and co-led by researchers at the Health and Technology District in Surrey, and the Mayo Clinic Sports Centre in Rochester, Minnesota.
Repetitive head impacts in youth hockey lead to significant changes in brain 'vital signs’
Read more: http://www.sfu.ca/sfunews/stories/2021/ ... -chan.html
-
greybeard58
- Posts: 2511
- Joined: Sat Aug 21, 2004 11:40 pm
Three players open up about the importance of mental health in women’s hockey
Three players open up about the importance of mental health in women’s hockey
Some hockey players are able to skate by without focusing on their mental health beyond what’s necessary to their game. They wake up and eat and train and perform their jobs and sleep with little to no difficulty. Others — like Daron Richardson — struggle to cope with the pressure that comes with being an athlete.
For many hockey players, including those performing at the collegiate, professional, and international levels, that pressure can build and turn into an insatiable monster that many athletes have to fight to suppress. Everyday activities turn into a battle and the will to live morphs into the will to simply make it through each day.
In 2010, 14 year old hockey player Daron Richardson committed suicide. In the wake of her death and in the midst of their grief, her parents created an initiative called Do it For Daron — a small foundation initially created to honor Daron’s memory and spread awareness for mental health.
DIFD has grown exponentially since then, blossoming into a widespread movement that is challenging the status quo. Supported by hockey players and their communities across North America, DIFD is now a beacon of hope for teens and young adults struggling with their mental health.
In 2017, the CWHL’s Calgary Inferno hosted the first annual Start the Spark game, featuring purple jerseys to commemorate Daron. The NWHL’s Boston Pride followed suit in 2018, and have made the evening an almost annual event in the years since. Several collegiate hockey programs across the United States and Canada, including Quinnipiac University in Connecticut and Union College in New York, host annual games with the intent of raising money for DIFD and mental health.
The hockey community has come together at all levels under the hashtag #WeAllSkateTogether to honor Daron’s memory and support the mission her parents created — to “inspire conversations, raise awareness, and transform youth mental health.”
Resources offered by initiatives like DIFD aim to alleviate some of that pressure, and give athletes an outlet and someone to turn to in times of crisis. The problem is that many athletes — and many people in general — are afraid to reach out. Especially in a culture like hockey, where toughness and unwillingness to bend or break is applauded and any sign of weakness is exploited, many players struggle with the very idea getting help for something they believe to be a non-issue.
“Everyone in sports is expected to be these super tough athletes,” said Grace Markey, a junior forward on Quinnipiac’s hockey squad, in an interview with The Ice Garden. “That’s kind of a mask that a lot of people think they have to put on.”
When so much of an athlete’s success is tied to their physical performance and imperturbable exterior, their mental health is often pushed to the back burner and gets left to simmer unchecked. The buildup of frustration and agony can be devastating for anyone, but when combined with the pressure of preserving a mandatory academic standard, pushing your body to the limit day in and day out, and somehow still maintaining your composure, it can result in devastating consequences.
That’s part of why Markey is so vocal about bringing initiatives like DIFD to college hockey programs like her own at Quinnipiac. “We just like to represent something that’s bigger than ourselves,” says Markey, who, according to assistant coach Amanda Mazzotta, was instrumental in revitalizing the Quinnipiac’s involvement with DIFD. “We’re just playing a game but it’s great that we can also spread mental health awareness as we do that.”
On Dec. 7, 2019, Quinnipiac hosted their second ever Do it for Daron Mental Health Awareness game at home against Cornell. Despite the Bobcats’ loss that night, Mazzotta commends Markey for her role in spreading the message of DIFD to her teammates and the Hamden community. “College sports gives these young people an avenue to create awesome change,” she says. “It gives our players a platform to reach more people ... so the fact that they’re as busy as they are and the fact that they’re excited to raise money for awesome organizations, I think that’s huge.”
The NWHL’s Kelsey Neumann shares Markey’s enthusiasm for programs that raise awareness for mental health.
While the Beauts have yet to host their own DIFD game (something Neumann says she would love to see in the future), the Beauts net minder is apart of a different initiative. She’s part of the the Goalie Guild’s “Lift the Mask” program, which aims to provide “mental health and performance support and resources for the goalie community.” Neumann decided to get involved with Lift the Mask for a variety of reasons, but mostly because, she says, “Mental health has been very important to me; it is something I have struggled with throughout my life. Growing up, mental health wasn’t talked about.”
Though mental illness has no preference for position, Mazzotta — who played goalie during her tenure at Cornell — agrees with Neumann that playing goaltender can be pretty rough on one’s mental health. “As a goalie, you’re kind of on your own island for 20 minutes at a time,” says Mazzotta. “You do have to be resilient and positive with yourself in terms of your self-talk.” That’s why initiatives like Lift the Mask are so pivotal.
Lift the Mask, however, is just one pivotal resource for hockey players aiming to provide mental health awareness and emotional support for its members. While many college athletic programs have built-in resources like psychologists or counselors, some don’t — and that’s where other members of the team’s support staff step in and help fill that role. For Markey, that pseudo-counselor was the program’s athletic trainer, Carrie Gaydos, who Mazzotta was also quick to praise. She’s like a “mom away from home” for many of the players, and one of the first people Markey expects she, along with most of her teammates, would turn to in a crisis.
Some athletes even have personalized sports psychologists, like Kelsey Neumann, who started seeing a professional while she was a goalie at SUNY Plattsburgh. “I now work with a great sports psychologist who has truly helped me on and off the ice,” says Neumann. “I also have people on the [Beauts] staff that I feel confident talking to in addition to my sports psych when I feel like I am struggling.”
Not every player or program has these kinds of resources for their athletes, nor does every professional organization. At such a pivotal point in women’s hockey history, it’s imperative that all athletes have more — and more adequate — mental health resources on hand in case the need arises; after all, it’s better to be over-prepared than to be caught off guard.
Moving forward, it’s important that international organizations like USA Hockey and Hockey Canada set the precedent for professional leagues when it comes to mental health initiatives. Rather than just tweet #BellLetsTalk and sharing the story of a singular program member, leagues and organizations need to make sure they’re doing right by the athletes they serve, and making sure they stay healthy — both physically and mentally.
When it comes to these big organizations, the three athletes have some ideas.
For one, trusted adults can be a great help, but the consequent hovering from those individuals, whether it’s coaches, trainers, or counselors, can be overwhelming when you first reach out for help. That’s why Markey suggests a tip line or online chat with a campus or registered professional with the added component of anonymity.
“A lot of people think that there’s a negative connotation with mental health,” she says, and adds that a lot of people view the part of them that’s suffering as a weakness that needs to be concealed from those around them, including teammates and coaches. Anonymity provides a great alternative to the shame that some athletes experience after asking for help from a coach or member of their program’s support staff.
While anonymous chat lines can be a great temporary fix, what happens when you’re constantly struggling and you need someone to turn to for long term help? Sophia Shaver, who spent the 2019-20 season competing with the PWHPA, has a few different ideas for athletes in particular.
“Most of us revolve our lives around our sport,” says Shaver, “so when we are struggling with our mental health and are unable to perform at our best we tend to think we’re failing as a person.”
Coaches and support staff can highlight team counselors, psychologists, and trainers as much as they want, but a lot of students and athletes are hesitant about talking to adults they don’t know about feelings they don’t understand. There’s also the additional fear that the staff touting these resources would personally never use them or believe in their usefulness, or that they’re only making their athletes aware of said programs and resources out of obligation.
“It’s not as effective to hear about these resources from leaders of an organization because it makes them seem intimidating and less accessible to athletes. It doesn’t create an inviting environment,” says Shaver, further emphasizing the importance of leaders on the team raising awareness for these resources instead of the adults, like captains or alternates. When peer leaders present these methods and share they, personally, have benefitted, athletes are more likely to reach out and get the help they need because their friends and teammates have vouched for its effectiveness.
If you know your friends or teammates are hurting but they aren’t receptive to emotional confrontations, Shaver recommends the path her own teammates took — small, random acts of kindness to brighten her day. “Texts to check in, little notes in my dress-down stall at the rink, and plans to do fun things reassured me that they were there for me when I was ready to open up,” she says. “The best way to be there for someone is to show them that they’re not alone and to let them open up to you in their own time.”
The biggest factor in improving mental health awareness, emphasized by all three, was the destigmatization of asking for help. Programs, resources, and initiatives are all just lip service unless we dismantle the idea that athletes need to be tough and strong in the face of every adversity, and that starts from within. “Leagues and collegiate programs could help their athletes by having discussions about mental health for starters,” says Neumann.
Shaver echoed similar sentiments. “You can have all the programs and resources in the world to help athletes, but when there’s such a large stigma surrounding mental health, getting those athletes to reach out for help is the hard part,” she says.
That’s why programs like Bell Canada’s #BellLetsTalk and event nights like Quinnipiac’s DIFD game are so important. Shaver says that sharing your own story on #BellLetsTalk Day can have a broader impact than just hitting retweet on every single hashtag. “As athletes, it would be great to see people open up about the mental battles they face while playing their sport.
“I bet people would find out we all have a lot more in common than we’d think.”
More than just a game: Women’s hockey and mental health
https://www.theicegarden.com/2020/5/28/ ... ace-markey
Some hockey players are able to skate by without focusing on their mental health beyond what’s necessary to their game. They wake up and eat and train and perform their jobs and sleep with little to no difficulty. Others — like Daron Richardson — struggle to cope with the pressure that comes with being an athlete.
For many hockey players, including those performing at the collegiate, professional, and international levels, that pressure can build and turn into an insatiable monster that many athletes have to fight to suppress. Everyday activities turn into a battle and the will to live morphs into the will to simply make it through each day.
In 2010, 14 year old hockey player Daron Richardson committed suicide. In the wake of her death and in the midst of their grief, her parents created an initiative called Do it For Daron — a small foundation initially created to honor Daron’s memory and spread awareness for mental health.
DIFD has grown exponentially since then, blossoming into a widespread movement that is challenging the status quo. Supported by hockey players and their communities across North America, DIFD is now a beacon of hope for teens and young adults struggling with their mental health.
In 2017, the CWHL’s Calgary Inferno hosted the first annual Start the Spark game, featuring purple jerseys to commemorate Daron. The NWHL’s Boston Pride followed suit in 2018, and have made the evening an almost annual event in the years since. Several collegiate hockey programs across the United States and Canada, including Quinnipiac University in Connecticut and Union College in New York, host annual games with the intent of raising money for DIFD and mental health.
The hockey community has come together at all levels under the hashtag #WeAllSkateTogether to honor Daron’s memory and support the mission her parents created — to “inspire conversations, raise awareness, and transform youth mental health.”
Resources offered by initiatives like DIFD aim to alleviate some of that pressure, and give athletes an outlet and someone to turn to in times of crisis. The problem is that many athletes — and many people in general — are afraid to reach out. Especially in a culture like hockey, where toughness and unwillingness to bend or break is applauded and any sign of weakness is exploited, many players struggle with the very idea getting help for something they believe to be a non-issue.
“Everyone in sports is expected to be these super tough athletes,” said Grace Markey, a junior forward on Quinnipiac’s hockey squad, in an interview with The Ice Garden. “That’s kind of a mask that a lot of people think they have to put on.”
When so much of an athlete’s success is tied to their physical performance and imperturbable exterior, their mental health is often pushed to the back burner and gets left to simmer unchecked. The buildup of frustration and agony can be devastating for anyone, but when combined with the pressure of preserving a mandatory academic standard, pushing your body to the limit day in and day out, and somehow still maintaining your composure, it can result in devastating consequences.
That’s part of why Markey is so vocal about bringing initiatives like DIFD to college hockey programs like her own at Quinnipiac. “We just like to represent something that’s bigger than ourselves,” says Markey, who, according to assistant coach Amanda Mazzotta, was instrumental in revitalizing the Quinnipiac’s involvement with DIFD. “We’re just playing a game but it’s great that we can also spread mental health awareness as we do that.”
On Dec. 7, 2019, Quinnipiac hosted their second ever Do it for Daron Mental Health Awareness game at home against Cornell. Despite the Bobcats’ loss that night, Mazzotta commends Markey for her role in spreading the message of DIFD to her teammates and the Hamden community. “College sports gives these young people an avenue to create awesome change,” she says. “It gives our players a platform to reach more people ... so the fact that they’re as busy as they are and the fact that they’re excited to raise money for awesome organizations, I think that’s huge.”
The NWHL’s Kelsey Neumann shares Markey’s enthusiasm for programs that raise awareness for mental health.
While the Beauts have yet to host their own DIFD game (something Neumann says she would love to see in the future), the Beauts net minder is apart of a different initiative. She’s part of the the Goalie Guild’s “Lift the Mask” program, which aims to provide “mental health and performance support and resources for the goalie community.” Neumann decided to get involved with Lift the Mask for a variety of reasons, but mostly because, she says, “Mental health has been very important to me; it is something I have struggled with throughout my life. Growing up, mental health wasn’t talked about.”
Though mental illness has no preference for position, Mazzotta — who played goalie during her tenure at Cornell — agrees with Neumann that playing goaltender can be pretty rough on one’s mental health. “As a goalie, you’re kind of on your own island for 20 minutes at a time,” says Mazzotta. “You do have to be resilient and positive with yourself in terms of your self-talk.” That’s why initiatives like Lift the Mask are so pivotal.
Lift the Mask, however, is just one pivotal resource for hockey players aiming to provide mental health awareness and emotional support for its members. While many college athletic programs have built-in resources like psychologists or counselors, some don’t — and that’s where other members of the team’s support staff step in and help fill that role. For Markey, that pseudo-counselor was the program’s athletic trainer, Carrie Gaydos, who Mazzotta was also quick to praise. She’s like a “mom away from home” for many of the players, and one of the first people Markey expects she, along with most of her teammates, would turn to in a crisis.
Some athletes even have personalized sports psychologists, like Kelsey Neumann, who started seeing a professional while she was a goalie at SUNY Plattsburgh. “I now work with a great sports psychologist who has truly helped me on and off the ice,” says Neumann. “I also have people on the [Beauts] staff that I feel confident talking to in addition to my sports psych when I feel like I am struggling.”
Not every player or program has these kinds of resources for their athletes, nor does every professional organization. At such a pivotal point in women’s hockey history, it’s imperative that all athletes have more — and more adequate — mental health resources on hand in case the need arises; after all, it’s better to be over-prepared than to be caught off guard.
Moving forward, it’s important that international organizations like USA Hockey and Hockey Canada set the precedent for professional leagues when it comes to mental health initiatives. Rather than just tweet #BellLetsTalk and sharing the story of a singular program member, leagues and organizations need to make sure they’re doing right by the athletes they serve, and making sure they stay healthy — both physically and mentally.
When it comes to these big organizations, the three athletes have some ideas.
For one, trusted adults can be a great help, but the consequent hovering from those individuals, whether it’s coaches, trainers, or counselors, can be overwhelming when you first reach out for help. That’s why Markey suggests a tip line or online chat with a campus or registered professional with the added component of anonymity.
“A lot of people think that there’s a negative connotation with mental health,” she says, and adds that a lot of people view the part of them that’s suffering as a weakness that needs to be concealed from those around them, including teammates and coaches. Anonymity provides a great alternative to the shame that some athletes experience after asking for help from a coach or member of their program’s support staff.
While anonymous chat lines can be a great temporary fix, what happens when you’re constantly struggling and you need someone to turn to for long term help? Sophia Shaver, who spent the 2019-20 season competing with the PWHPA, has a few different ideas for athletes in particular.
“Most of us revolve our lives around our sport,” says Shaver, “so when we are struggling with our mental health and are unable to perform at our best we tend to think we’re failing as a person.”
Coaches and support staff can highlight team counselors, psychologists, and trainers as much as they want, but a lot of students and athletes are hesitant about talking to adults they don’t know about feelings they don’t understand. There’s also the additional fear that the staff touting these resources would personally never use them or believe in their usefulness, or that they’re only making their athletes aware of said programs and resources out of obligation.
“It’s not as effective to hear about these resources from leaders of an organization because it makes them seem intimidating and less accessible to athletes. It doesn’t create an inviting environment,” says Shaver, further emphasizing the importance of leaders on the team raising awareness for these resources instead of the adults, like captains or alternates. When peer leaders present these methods and share they, personally, have benefitted, athletes are more likely to reach out and get the help they need because their friends and teammates have vouched for its effectiveness.
If you know your friends or teammates are hurting but they aren’t receptive to emotional confrontations, Shaver recommends the path her own teammates took — small, random acts of kindness to brighten her day. “Texts to check in, little notes in my dress-down stall at the rink, and plans to do fun things reassured me that they were there for me when I was ready to open up,” she says. “The best way to be there for someone is to show them that they’re not alone and to let them open up to you in their own time.”
The biggest factor in improving mental health awareness, emphasized by all three, was the destigmatization of asking for help. Programs, resources, and initiatives are all just lip service unless we dismantle the idea that athletes need to be tough and strong in the face of every adversity, and that starts from within. “Leagues and collegiate programs could help their athletes by having discussions about mental health for starters,” says Neumann.
Shaver echoed similar sentiments. “You can have all the programs and resources in the world to help athletes, but when there’s such a large stigma surrounding mental health, getting those athletes to reach out for help is the hard part,” she says.
That’s why programs like Bell Canada’s #BellLetsTalk and event nights like Quinnipiac’s DIFD game are so important. Shaver says that sharing your own story on #BellLetsTalk Day can have a broader impact than just hitting retweet on every single hashtag. “As athletes, it would be great to see people open up about the mental battles they face while playing their sport.
“I bet people would find out we all have a lot more in common than we’d think.”
More than just a game: Women’s hockey and mental health
https://www.theicegarden.com/2020/5/28/ ... ace-markey
-
greybeard58
- Posts: 2511
- Joined: Sat Aug 21, 2004 11:40 pm
Adolescents have been reporting more concussions in recent years
Adolescents have been reporting more concussions in recent years
Concussions among adolescents have increased in recent years, according to new research. Scientists used 2016-2020 data from eighth-, 10th- and 12th-graders who responded to school-based surveys. Nearly 1 in 5 of these students reported having had at least one concussion in 2016 but that number increased to nearly 1 in 4 four years later. The incidence of exactly one concussion and two or more concussions also increased. Researchers observed an increase in self-reported concussions across sexes, races, and across other demographics, including among those who participated in competitive sports. Although these findings are subject to recall bias, researchers point to how increased awareness of concussions among the U.S. public may be a factor behind the increase in self-reporting.
Trends in the Prevalence of Concussion Reported by US Adolescents, 2016-2020
Read more: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/a ... ct/2779560
Concussions among adolescents have increased in recent years, according to new research. Scientists used 2016-2020 data from eighth-, 10th- and 12th-graders who responded to school-based surveys. Nearly 1 in 5 of these students reported having had at least one concussion in 2016 but that number increased to nearly 1 in 4 four years later. The incidence of exactly one concussion and two or more concussions also increased. Researchers observed an increase in self-reported concussions across sexes, races, and across other demographics, including among those who participated in competitive sports. Although these findings are subject to recall bias, researchers point to how increased awareness of concussions among the U.S. public may be a factor behind the increase in self-reporting.
Trends in the Prevalence of Concussion Reported by US Adolescents, 2016-2020
Read more: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/a ... ct/2779560
-
greybeard58
- Posts: 2511
- Joined: Sat Aug 21, 2004 11:40 pm
Concussed. A Retreat focused on healing and community
Concussed. A Retreat focused on healing and community
For any athlete, a concussion diagnosis can be pretty scary; it does not just affect playing time or training, it affects other important areas in daily life.
For every high school athlete that is diagnosed with a concussion, it is estimated about 10% will experience post-concussion syndrome.*
As for other age groups and populations that are diagnosed with concussions, it is estimated 5-30% will experience post-concussion syndrome.*
Former athlete, Cait Ward, was diagnosed with a post-concussion syndrome after suffering a concussion during a lacrosse game. As she struggled with isolation caused by her symptoms, she discovered how difficult it was to find viable resources for people who were experiencing her symptoms.
Now, Cait’s mission is to help those suffering with post-concussion syndrome feel less isolated and find strength through community. Her organization, Concussed., will be hosting a summer retreat in Naples, Maine this June 2021 for women who have been managing post-concussion syndrome for the past two years.
Retreat Details:
Participants: Women (18-42+) who have suffered from Post-Concussion Syndrome for two years or more (or, more broadly, a concussion that has changed their life’s trajectory)
Dates: June 11-14
Location: Naples, Maine
Cost: Free of charge, thanks to a loyal group of sponsors.
The true cost of each participant is $1,000, and Concussion welcomes any fundraising from participants or friends who can raise or contribute.
Concussed. A Retreat focused on healing and community
Read more: https://womenshockeylife.com/concussed- ... community/
To find out more information about the retreat, the schedule, and what is included, visit: https://www.concussedcait.com//retreats
For any athlete, a concussion diagnosis can be pretty scary; it does not just affect playing time or training, it affects other important areas in daily life.
For every high school athlete that is diagnosed with a concussion, it is estimated about 10% will experience post-concussion syndrome.*
As for other age groups and populations that are diagnosed with concussions, it is estimated 5-30% will experience post-concussion syndrome.*
Former athlete, Cait Ward, was diagnosed with a post-concussion syndrome after suffering a concussion during a lacrosse game. As she struggled with isolation caused by her symptoms, she discovered how difficult it was to find viable resources for people who were experiencing her symptoms.
Now, Cait’s mission is to help those suffering with post-concussion syndrome feel less isolated and find strength through community. Her organization, Concussed., will be hosting a summer retreat in Naples, Maine this June 2021 for women who have been managing post-concussion syndrome for the past two years.
Retreat Details:
Participants: Women (18-42+) who have suffered from Post-Concussion Syndrome for two years or more (or, more broadly, a concussion that has changed their life’s trajectory)
Dates: June 11-14
Location: Naples, Maine
Cost: Free of charge, thanks to a loyal group of sponsors.
The true cost of each participant is $1,000, and Concussion welcomes any fundraising from participants or friends who can raise or contribute.
Concussed. A Retreat focused on healing and community
Read more: https://womenshockeylife.com/concussed- ... community/
To find out more information about the retreat, the schedule, and what is included, visit: https://www.concussedcait.com//retreats
-
greybeard58
- Posts: 2511
- Joined: Sat Aug 21, 2004 11:40 pm
Science playing catch up in women's concussion research
Science playing catch up in women's concussion research
Pro-hockey-player-turned doctor Karolina Urban came upon her interest in concussion diagnosis and recovery the hard way. Playing for the University of Toronto Varsity Blues in 2008, she took a late open-ice hit from her side. She was diagnosed with a concussion and followed the appropriate protocols, but when she returned to the ice, she realized something was wrong.
“I actually cleared all the testing, all the baseline testing that they had in place, and when I got back on the ice I noticed I (was) not the same player. I was missing pucks under my stick, I was still getting very lightheaded,” she told CTVnews.ca in an interview. “I noticed there was a disconnect between what I was feeling and what the testing was showing.”
The experience illustrated for her the lack of research at the time about concussions, and in particular, the dearth of research and diagnostic tools tailored for women who suffer concussions.
Urban ended up playing five years of pro hockey in the Canadian Women’s Hockey League and the European Women’s Hockey League, winning a Clarkson Cup with the Markham Thunder in 2018. But the concussion at U of T – the first of two she suffered – and her realization about the lack of research around head injuries in women inspired her to pursue her degree in neuroscience and focus on concussions.
The issue of concussions has emerged in recent years largely in the context of male sports leagues like the NFL and NHL, and its links to long-term dangers, such as early onset dementia.
But there has, until recently, been little attention paid to concussions suffered by women, despite research that suggests women suffer concussions differently than men, including experiencing worse symptoms and requiring longer recovery times.
Diagnostic methods are typically developed for the male brain, and research is often funded by the deep pockets associated with men’s professional sports leagues, which leads to male-focused treatment protocols.
It’s a reality that can leave women, particularly athletes, susceptible to misdiagnosis, improper treatment, and the risk of frightening long-term effects.
“We're still trying to understand the differences, but what we do know is that there are hormonal influences that happen after the fact, and we're not sure how that affects brain recovery, and there needs to be a lot more time and money spent on how females differ from males in terms of recovery,” says Urban, currently Vice-President of Scientific and Medical Affairs at biopharma company Avicanna.
Fortunately, new research is beginning to look at how women specifically suffer and react to concussions, and a new study carried out by Ontario startup RENITA Medical and the Hospital for Sick Children is hoping to both shed light on concussions in women and address the broader challenge of how to accurately diagnose concussions.
The study is using magnetoencephalography, or MEG, neuroimaging technology to scan brains of women who have suffered concussions and those who have not in order to compare brain activity.
“One of the main problems with concussion is that it's incredibly difficult to diagnose objectively,” says Benjamin Dunkley, a cognitive neuroscientist at Sick Kids, who is leading the study.
Current diagnostic techniques rely heavily on self-reported symptoms, such as dizziness, fatigue, or light-sensitivity problems. But self-reporting is subjective, and can be unreliable.
“There are no radiological indications. By that what we mean is that when we look at an MRI or a CT scan, there are no lesions in the brain that are visible in a concussion,” he said. “So this makes it incredibly difficult for neurologists and radiologist doctors to objectively say that someone has had a concussion.”
MEG scanning, on the other hand, is able to measure activity in specific brain regions and how they interact with each other, almost like mapping out cities and the roads that connect them. The technology has in the past been used to map brain activity in patients about to undergo surgery for epilepsy or brain tumours. But the researchers hope to use it to establish objective markers that can be used for diagnosing and more deeply understanding concussions.
“(MEG) records the minute tiny magnetic fields generated by the brain that serve all our thoughts feelings and behaviours,” said Dunkley. “When our brain activity generates these behaviours it’s observed by electrical currents. The machine that we use uses these incredibly sensitive magnetic sensors, which are just placed outside the head to pick up that really minute electrical activity.”
The study is also examining the effects of concussion on women specifically and the degree to which women suffer concussions more severely than men and why that is.
Ultimately, RENITA hopes to build a concussion tool that will both accurately diagnose concussions and take into account differences of biological sex in the diagnosis, the company's co-founder, Caitlin Baltzer, explained in an email. They also hope to be able to identify when brain activity has fully recovered from a concussion and it is safe to resume playing. This could help athletes avoid more severe outcomes, including second impact syndrome, which is a swelling of the brain that can occur when a second concussion is suffered before full recovery from the first.
It was a fatal case of second impact syndrome suffered in 2013 by female high-school rugby player Rowan Stringer that spurred the passage of “Rowan’s Law” in 2018 to establish concussion protocols for amateur athletes, children and youth in Ontario.
Urban, who along with Dunkley is on RENITA’s advisory board, is hoping the result will be better tools to allow female athletes to continue with their sports even after suffering head injuries.
“The brain does recover, and if we're basing all our recovery metrics on the male brain, then maybe we're missing a picture and maybe that's why we're seeing that females have a longer recovery time or more symptoms than the male population,” she said. “And I think it's just we need to spend the time and effort in getting that data.”
Science playing catch up in women's concussion research
Read more: https://www.ctvnews.ca/health/science-p ... -1.5449924
Pro-hockey-player-turned doctor Karolina Urban came upon her interest in concussion diagnosis and recovery the hard way. Playing for the University of Toronto Varsity Blues in 2008, she took a late open-ice hit from her side. She was diagnosed with a concussion and followed the appropriate protocols, but when she returned to the ice, she realized something was wrong.
“I actually cleared all the testing, all the baseline testing that they had in place, and when I got back on the ice I noticed I (was) not the same player. I was missing pucks under my stick, I was still getting very lightheaded,” she told CTVnews.ca in an interview. “I noticed there was a disconnect between what I was feeling and what the testing was showing.”
The experience illustrated for her the lack of research at the time about concussions, and in particular, the dearth of research and diagnostic tools tailored for women who suffer concussions.
Urban ended up playing five years of pro hockey in the Canadian Women’s Hockey League and the European Women’s Hockey League, winning a Clarkson Cup with the Markham Thunder in 2018. But the concussion at U of T – the first of two she suffered – and her realization about the lack of research around head injuries in women inspired her to pursue her degree in neuroscience and focus on concussions.
The issue of concussions has emerged in recent years largely in the context of male sports leagues like the NFL and NHL, and its links to long-term dangers, such as early onset dementia.
But there has, until recently, been little attention paid to concussions suffered by women, despite research that suggests women suffer concussions differently than men, including experiencing worse symptoms and requiring longer recovery times.
Diagnostic methods are typically developed for the male brain, and research is often funded by the deep pockets associated with men’s professional sports leagues, which leads to male-focused treatment protocols.
It’s a reality that can leave women, particularly athletes, susceptible to misdiagnosis, improper treatment, and the risk of frightening long-term effects.
“We're still trying to understand the differences, but what we do know is that there are hormonal influences that happen after the fact, and we're not sure how that affects brain recovery, and there needs to be a lot more time and money spent on how females differ from males in terms of recovery,” says Urban, currently Vice-President of Scientific and Medical Affairs at biopharma company Avicanna.
Fortunately, new research is beginning to look at how women specifically suffer and react to concussions, and a new study carried out by Ontario startup RENITA Medical and the Hospital for Sick Children is hoping to both shed light on concussions in women and address the broader challenge of how to accurately diagnose concussions.
The study is using magnetoencephalography, or MEG, neuroimaging technology to scan brains of women who have suffered concussions and those who have not in order to compare brain activity.
“One of the main problems with concussion is that it's incredibly difficult to diagnose objectively,” says Benjamin Dunkley, a cognitive neuroscientist at Sick Kids, who is leading the study.
Current diagnostic techniques rely heavily on self-reported symptoms, such as dizziness, fatigue, or light-sensitivity problems. But self-reporting is subjective, and can be unreliable.
“There are no radiological indications. By that what we mean is that when we look at an MRI or a CT scan, there are no lesions in the brain that are visible in a concussion,” he said. “So this makes it incredibly difficult for neurologists and radiologist doctors to objectively say that someone has had a concussion.”
MEG scanning, on the other hand, is able to measure activity in specific brain regions and how they interact with each other, almost like mapping out cities and the roads that connect them. The technology has in the past been used to map brain activity in patients about to undergo surgery for epilepsy or brain tumours. But the researchers hope to use it to establish objective markers that can be used for diagnosing and more deeply understanding concussions.
“(MEG) records the minute tiny magnetic fields generated by the brain that serve all our thoughts feelings and behaviours,” said Dunkley. “When our brain activity generates these behaviours it’s observed by electrical currents. The machine that we use uses these incredibly sensitive magnetic sensors, which are just placed outside the head to pick up that really minute electrical activity.”
The study is also examining the effects of concussion on women specifically and the degree to which women suffer concussions more severely than men and why that is.
Ultimately, RENITA hopes to build a concussion tool that will both accurately diagnose concussions and take into account differences of biological sex in the diagnosis, the company's co-founder, Caitlin Baltzer, explained in an email. They also hope to be able to identify when brain activity has fully recovered from a concussion and it is safe to resume playing. This could help athletes avoid more severe outcomes, including second impact syndrome, which is a swelling of the brain that can occur when a second concussion is suffered before full recovery from the first.
It was a fatal case of second impact syndrome suffered in 2013 by female high-school rugby player Rowan Stringer that spurred the passage of “Rowan’s Law” in 2018 to establish concussion protocols for amateur athletes, children and youth in Ontario.
Urban, who along with Dunkley is on RENITA’s advisory board, is hoping the result will be better tools to allow female athletes to continue with their sports even after suffering head injuries.
“The brain does recover, and if we're basing all our recovery metrics on the male brain, then maybe we're missing a picture and maybe that's why we're seeing that females have a longer recovery time or more symptoms than the male population,” she said. “And I think it's just we need to spend the time and effort in getting that data.”
Science playing catch up in women's concussion research
Read more: https://www.ctvnews.ca/health/science-p ... -1.5449924
-
greybeard58
- Posts: 2511
- Joined: Sat Aug 21, 2004 11:40 pm
Monica Petrosino: “There is a life after sport, and it isn’t what completely defines you."
Monica Petrosino: “There is a life after sport, and it isn’t what completely defines you."
Monica Petrosino dedicated almost 20 years to ice hockey and ascended to the elite level of playing for Team GB, but her dreams were tragically dropped when a serious concussion forced her to accept retirement at the age of 24.
“During a game in 2014, I was skating at full pelt when someone took my feet out from underneath and another came straight into me,” said Monica. “My head slammed onto the ice. I don’t think anyone realised the severity of what had happened.”
Monica was sent home and had severe headaches and sickness, but no-one suspected a concussion.
“The next day I was brought into another game. About five minutes in, I completely blacked out. I was taken to A&E, which is where the injury was picked up.
“For the next three to six weeks I had sickness, nausea, headaches… I felt sleepy all the time, but the worst symptom was speech disturbance.
I really struggled for a year to get back into hockey. My motivation and reaction times were drastically different.
Despite the challenges, Monica’s love and tenacity for the sport saw her being reselected for the GB Women’s Senior Team. But a series of minor knocks to the head along the way culminated when she sustained another hit during the 2019 World Championships.
“I eventually decided that it was time to retire. I still get upset about the fact that I can’t play.”
Monica’s retirement didn’t end her career in ice hockey though, as she decided to start coaching instead. She is also now studying a degree in Psychology.
“There is a life after sport, and it isn’t what completely defines you. If you have to step down because of a concussion, you will get that amazing buzz from something else.”
Monica is now a keen advocate of raising concussion awareness.
“I want concussion awareness to become an absolute staple in sports. I want there to be protocols, not just at GB level but at a club level as well.
I don’t care if I need to shout at the top of my lungs to tell everyone repeatedly, everyone needs to know."
Monica Petrosino
Read more: https://www.headway.org.uk/about-brain- ... petrosino/
Monica Petrosino dedicated almost 20 years to ice hockey and ascended to the elite level of playing for Team GB, but her dreams were tragically dropped when a serious concussion forced her to accept retirement at the age of 24.
“During a game in 2014, I was skating at full pelt when someone took my feet out from underneath and another came straight into me,” said Monica. “My head slammed onto the ice. I don’t think anyone realised the severity of what had happened.”
Monica was sent home and had severe headaches and sickness, but no-one suspected a concussion.
“The next day I was brought into another game. About five minutes in, I completely blacked out. I was taken to A&E, which is where the injury was picked up.
“For the next three to six weeks I had sickness, nausea, headaches… I felt sleepy all the time, but the worst symptom was speech disturbance.
I really struggled for a year to get back into hockey. My motivation and reaction times were drastically different.
Despite the challenges, Monica’s love and tenacity for the sport saw her being reselected for the GB Women’s Senior Team. But a series of minor knocks to the head along the way culminated when she sustained another hit during the 2019 World Championships.
“I eventually decided that it was time to retire. I still get upset about the fact that I can’t play.”
Monica’s retirement didn’t end her career in ice hockey though, as she decided to start coaching instead. She is also now studying a degree in Psychology.
“There is a life after sport, and it isn’t what completely defines you. If you have to step down because of a concussion, you will get that amazing buzz from something else.”
Monica is now a keen advocate of raising concussion awareness.
“I want concussion awareness to become an absolute staple in sports. I want there to be protocols, not just at GB level but at a club level as well.
I don’t care if I need to shout at the top of my lungs to tell everyone repeatedly, everyone needs to know."
Monica Petrosino
Read more: https://www.headway.org.uk/about-brain- ... petrosino/
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greybeard58
- Posts: 2511
- Joined: Sat Aug 21, 2004 11:40 pm
"We’re all finding the same thing, females are more predisposed to brain injury than males"
"We’re all finding the same thing, females are more predisposed to brain injury than males"
Female soccer players are twice as likely to suffer concussion as their male counterparts, a study of more than 80,000 teenage players across US high schools has found.
Researchers analysed survey data from around 43,000 male and 39,000 female players from schools in Michigan over 3 academic years. A striking difference emerged between the sexes in their likelihood of having a sports-related head injury, with the girls’ chance of concussion 1.88 times higher than the boys’, according to the findings published on 27 April in JAMA Network Open.
Scientists already suspected that head injuries were more common, and required longer recovery times, in female athletes. But concrete data were lacking, says neuropathologist Willie Stewart at the University of Glasgow, UK, who led the study. “We’re doing so little research in female athletes,” he says. Such a large volume of data on sports injuries, collected by the Michigan High School Athletic Association, offered an opportunity to investigate whether female athletes really are at higher risk of concussion (see ‘Concussion risk’).
“There were indeed differences between male and female athletes,” says Stewart. How the high-school players sustained their injuries also differed significantly between male and female adolescents: the boys’ most common way of becoming concussed was through bashing into another player, with almost half of all concussions reported happening in this way. Girls were most likely to be concussed after colliding with another object, such as the ball or one of the goalposts. Boys were also more likely to be removed from play immediately after a suspected head injury than were girls.
The different mechanism for head injuries in girls is an important finding, Stewart says. “It might be one reason girls with concussion were not being picked up on the field so regularly,” he adds. Concussion-management systems currently in use — from how potential head injuries are spotted during a match, to how athletes are treated and how quickly they return to play — are almost exclusively dictated by research on male athletes, says Stewart. “Rather than the current, male-informed, one-size-fits-all approach to concussion management, there might need to be consideration of sex-specific approaches,” he says. This could include restrictions on heading footballs, or having more medically trained personnel present during female matches.
Liz Williams, who researches biomechanics and head injuries at Swansea University, UK, conducted a large international study into female rugby players and their experiences of injury in 2020. Stewart’s findings don’t surprise her. “We’re all finding the same thing, females are more predisposed to brain injury than males,” she says, “and the incidence is likely higher, in my opinion, than what is being reported.”
Head-injury risk higher for female soccer players, massive survey finds, Read more at:
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01184-8
Read the original investigation referenced in the article above:
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamane ... le/2779117
Female soccer players are twice as likely to suffer concussion as their male counterparts, a study of more than 80,000 teenage players across US high schools has found.
Researchers analysed survey data from around 43,000 male and 39,000 female players from schools in Michigan over 3 academic years. A striking difference emerged between the sexes in their likelihood of having a sports-related head injury, with the girls’ chance of concussion 1.88 times higher than the boys’, according to the findings published on 27 April in JAMA Network Open.
Scientists already suspected that head injuries were more common, and required longer recovery times, in female athletes. But concrete data were lacking, says neuropathologist Willie Stewart at the University of Glasgow, UK, who led the study. “We’re doing so little research in female athletes,” he says. Such a large volume of data on sports injuries, collected by the Michigan High School Athletic Association, offered an opportunity to investigate whether female athletes really are at higher risk of concussion (see ‘Concussion risk’).
“There were indeed differences between male and female athletes,” says Stewart. How the high-school players sustained their injuries also differed significantly between male and female adolescents: the boys’ most common way of becoming concussed was through bashing into another player, with almost half of all concussions reported happening in this way. Girls were most likely to be concussed after colliding with another object, such as the ball or one of the goalposts. Boys were also more likely to be removed from play immediately after a suspected head injury than were girls.
The different mechanism for head injuries in girls is an important finding, Stewart says. “It might be one reason girls with concussion were not being picked up on the field so regularly,” he adds. Concussion-management systems currently in use — from how potential head injuries are spotted during a match, to how athletes are treated and how quickly they return to play — are almost exclusively dictated by research on male athletes, says Stewart. “Rather than the current, male-informed, one-size-fits-all approach to concussion management, there might need to be consideration of sex-specific approaches,” he says. This could include restrictions on heading footballs, or having more medically trained personnel present during female matches.
Liz Williams, who researches biomechanics and head injuries at Swansea University, UK, conducted a large international study into female rugby players and their experiences of injury in 2020. Stewart’s findings don’t surprise her. “We’re all finding the same thing, females are more predisposed to brain injury than males,” she says, “and the incidence is likely higher, in my opinion, than what is being reported.”
Head-injury risk higher for female soccer players, massive survey finds, Read more at:
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01184-8
Read the original investigation referenced in the article above:
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamane ... le/2779117
-
greybeard58
- Posts: 2511
- Joined: Sat Aug 21, 2004 11:40 pm
1,000 Reasons for Hope
1,000 Reasons for Hope
The 1,000 Reasons for Hope report celebrates the first 1,000 brain donors studied at the VA-BU-CLF Brain Bank since 2008 and how they have advanced research on concussions and CTE. Inside you'll find never-before-seen donor demographics, new testimonials from donor families including Dwayne Johnson, and a roadmap for the future of brain trauma research.
This report, created by research collaborators from the VA, Boston University, and the Concussion Legacy Foundation (CLF), explains how the next 1,000 brain donors will answer critical questions that take us closer to preventing, diagnosing, and treating CTE and other long-term consequences of concussion and traumatic brain injury.
Read the report at: https://concussionfoundation.org/sites/ ... index.html
The 1,000 Reasons for Hope report celebrates the first 1,000 brain donors studied at the VA-BU-CLF Brain Bank since 2008 and how they have advanced research on concussions and CTE. Inside you'll find never-before-seen donor demographics, new testimonials from donor families including Dwayne Johnson, and a roadmap for the future of brain trauma research.
This report, created by research collaborators from the VA, Boston University, and the Concussion Legacy Foundation (CLF), explains how the next 1,000 brain donors will answer critical questions that take us closer to preventing, diagnosing, and treating CTE and other long-term consequences of concussion and traumatic brain injury.
Read the report at: https://concussionfoundation.org/sites/ ... index.html
-
greybeard58
- Posts: 2511
- Joined: Sat Aug 21, 2004 11:40 pm
Bruns played hockey at Edina High School but a concussion she sustained her senior year prevented her from playing colle
Bruns played hockey at Edina High School but a concussion she sustained her senior year prevented her from playing college.
Grant Standbrook was one of the architects behind the University of Maine’s rise to men’s ice hockey prominence and the Black Bears’ two NCAA Division I championships. He was an assistant coach for 21 years at UMaine and the recruiting coordinator.
Now his granddaughter is going to try to help the UMaine women’s ice hockey team become an NCAA championship contender.
Emily Bruns, who has spent the past two years working with the National Hockey League’s Chicago Blackhawks, has been hired as an assistant coach along with former Lindenwood University (Missouri) men’s club hockey assistant Trey Flesch.
The 26-year-old Bruns, from Edina, Minnesota, is the daughter of Jill Standbrook and Joe Bruns, and spent a lot of time in the Bangor area while growing up attending hockey camps involving her grandfather.
“I’m really excited. The University of Maine was like an extended family for me. It’s very surreal to be coming back,” Bruns said.
Bruns worked in community relations with the Blackhawks and has coached players of all ages. She worked closely with Kevin Delaney, the founder of Delaney Hockey, which develops players of all different ages in the Chicago area.
“It was a great experience for me,” Bruns said.
“She has a pretty special hockey mind,” UMaine head coach Richard Reichenbach said. “She loves working with players and developing them.”
Bruns played hockey at Edina High School but a concussion she sustained her senior year prevented her from trying to play in college.
She attended Columbia College in Chicago and while trying to find a casual league to play in at a local rink, the rink manager invited her to coach in the youth program.
“(Grant) said I was going to love it and I should try it. I worked at the rink for five years, and it was a very good experience. And I coached a couple of girls teams in the area,” Bruns said.
She earned her degree, and after working with the Blackhawks returned to Minnesota before deciding to attend the American Hockey Coaches Association convention in Naples, Florida, to do some networking this past April.
That’s where she learned about the UMaine job opening.
She said her grandfather, a University of Maine Sports Hall of Fame inductee, was excited when he learned she was heading to UMaine. She said he has been a “huge influence” in her life and development as a coach.
“The big thing he has taught me is to learn the little details. That’s real important,” Bruns said. “He also told me to be a sponge. It’s always good to get multiple viewpoints and learn as much as you can from different people.”
Bruns said she was 5 years old when she began attending hockey clinics in Orono, and she looks forward to working with college players and a UMaine team that is coming off a dramatic turnaround season that saw the Black Bears nationally ranked for six weeks.
UMaine won a Hockey East playoff series for the first time, topping Boston University in three games in the quarterfinals. The Black Bears finished 19-14-5 overall, 11-9-4 in the conference after going 20-44-3 and 12-34-2 in the two previous years combined.
“I’m close in age with them so it will be more of a mentor relationship,” Bruns said.
One of her first stops upon her return may be to where she and her grandfather spent a lot of quality time.
“Pat’s Pizza,” she said.
UMaine Sports Hall of Famer Standbrook’s granddaughter named Black Bear assistant
Read more: https://bangordailynews.com/2018/08/07/ ... assistant/
Grant Standbrook was one of the architects behind the University of Maine’s rise to men’s ice hockey prominence and the Black Bears’ two NCAA Division I championships. He was an assistant coach for 21 years at UMaine and the recruiting coordinator.
Now his granddaughter is going to try to help the UMaine women’s ice hockey team become an NCAA championship contender.
Emily Bruns, who has spent the past two years working with the National Hockey League’s Chicago Blackhawks, has been hired as an assistant coach along with former Lindenwood University (Missouri) men’s club hockey assistant Trey Flesch.
The 26-year-old Bruns, from Edina, Minnesota, is the daughter of Jill Standbrook and Joe Bruns, and spent a lot of time in the Bangor area while growing up attending hockey camps involving her grandfather.
“I’m really excited. The University of Maine was like an extended family for me. It’s very surreal to be coming back,” Bruns said.
Bruns worked in community relations with the Blackhawks and has coached players of all ages. She worked closely with Kevin Delaney, the founder of Delaney Hockey, which develops players of all different ages in the Chicago area.
“It was a great experience for me,” Bruns said.
“She has a pretty special hockey mind,” UMaine head coach Richard Reichenbach said. “She loves working with players and developing them.”
Bruns played hockey at Edina High School but a concussion she sustained her senior year prevented her from trying to play in college.
She attended Columbia College in Chicago and while trying to find a casual league to play in at a local rink, the rink manager invited her to coach in the youth program.
“(Grant) said I was going to love it and I should try it. I worked at the rink for five years, and it was a very good experience. And I coached a couple of girls teams in the area,” Bruns said.
She earned her degree, and after working with the Blackhawks returned to Minnesota before deciding to attend the American Hockey Coaches Association convention in Naples, Florida, to do some networking this past April.
That’s where she learned about the UMaine job opening.
She said her grandfather, a University of Maine Sports Hall of Fame inductee, was excited when he learned she was heading to UMaine. She said he has been a “huge influence” in her life and development as a coach.
“The big thing he has taught me is to learn the little details. That’s real important,” Bruns said. “He also told me to be a sponge. It’s always good to get multiple viewpoints and learn as much as you can from different people.”
Bruns said she was 5 years old when she began attending hockey clinics in Orono, and she looks forward to working with college players and a UMaine team that is coming off a dramatic turnaround season that saw the Black Bears nationally ranked for six weeks.
UMaine won a Hockey East playoff series for the first time, topping Boston University in three games in the quarterfinals. The Black Bears finished 19-14-5 overall, 11-9-4 in the conference after going 20-44-3 and 12-34-2 in the two previous years combined.
“I’m close in age with them so it will be more of a mentor relationship,” Bruns said.
One of her first stops upon her return may be to where she and her grandfather spent a lot of quality time.
“Pat’s Pizza,” she said.
UMaine Sports Hall of Famer Standbrook’s granddaughter named Black Bear assistant
Read more: https://bangordailynews.com/2018/08/07/ ... assistant/
-
greybeard58
- Posts: 2511
- Joined: Sat Aug 21, 2004 11:40 pm
Small bumps and bodychecks in youth hockey can cause brain damage say researchers
Small bumps and bodychecks in youth hockey can cause brain damage say researchers
Neuroscientists at Simon Fraser University have found a link between brain impairment and repetitive hits in youth hockey.
SFU researchers are working in partnership with Mayo Clinic Orthopedics and Sports Medicine in Rochester, Minnesota, in a long-term study focused on concussions in Canada. In the first phase of the study, they monitored the brain function of Junior A hockey players in Minnesota during the playing season. They’re now in the second phase of the study, which replicates phase one, but with younger, Bantam hockey players.
The latest findings were published in the peer-reviewed journal Brain Communications.
“What we found was that players had significant changes in their brain vital signs over the course of the season, and these changes were directly correlated to the number of head impacts each player received,” says Dr. Shaun Fickling, the lead author of the study.
Fickling and his team tested players’ cognitive brain function using NeuroCatch, a medical device developed in B.C. Players place the device over their heads rinkside, for real-time information on their brain activity.
“It’s a five-minute scan,” says Dr. Ryan D’Arcy, a neuroscientist and co-creator of the NeuroCatch. “After five minutes, just like you’d have your blood pressure in a doctor’s office, you’ll have your brain vital signs.”
When monitoring bantam hockey players, aged 14 and under, minor hits and body checks – which are routine during a hockey game -- were found to hinder their brain activity. The head impacts are referred to as subconcussions. The hits weren’t big enough to cause a conventional concussion, but can create similar levels of brain impairment as they accumulate.
“These impacts could add up over time and cause something more serious, like changes in dementia, or mental health and suicide,” says D’Arcy.
The findings suggest concussions should be viewed on a spectrum, with varying degrees of harm to the brain, rather than a singular injury you either have or don’t have. Researchers say brain impairment detected by the NeuroCatch technology can then allow medical specialists to tailor adequate treatment for the affected athletes.
“To be able to measure these changes in brain function will allow us to better manage players’ careers and their injury trajectories as well,” says Fickling. “We really want to make sure you allow not just athletes, but people, the required time to recover before going back to activity, and that’s really the key.”
But, you can’t treat what you can’t measure, D’Arcy explains. Now, the focus is on making the Health Canada approved NeuroCatch available to as many athletes as possible, at all skill levels.
“We’re getting them in hockey rinks, fields, clinics and hospitals throughout our country and the U.S. at the moment.”
The research team intends to analyze other contact sports, as the multi-year study continues.
Small bumps and bodychecks in youth hockey can cause brain damage, say researchers
Read more: https://bc.ctvnews.ca/small-bumps-and-b ... -1.5401335
Neuroscientists at Simon Fraser University have found a link between brain impairment and repetitive hits in youth hockey.
SFU researchers are working in partnership with Mayo Clinic Orthopedics and Sports Medicine in Rochester, Minnesota, in a long-term study focused on concussions in Canada. In the first phase of the study, they monitored the brain function of Junior A hockey players in Minnesota during the playing season. They’re now in the second phase of the study, which replicates phase one, but with younger, Bantam hockey players.
The latest findings were published in the peer-reviewed journal Brain Communications.
“What we found was that players had significant changes in their brain vital signs over the course of the season, and these changes were directly correlated to the number of head impacts each player received,” says Dr. Shaun Fickling, the lead author of the study.
Fickling and his team tested players’ cognitive brain function using NeuroCatch, a medical device developed in B.C. Players place the device over their heads rinkside, for real-time information on their brain activity.
“It’s a five-minute scan,” says Dr. Ryan D’Arcy, a neuroscientist and co-creator of the NeuroCatch. “After five minutes, just like you’d have your blood pressure in a doctor’s office, you’ll have your brain vital signs.”
When monitoring bantam hockey players, aged 14 and under, minor hits and body checks – which are routine during a hockey game -- were found to hinder their brain activity. The head impacts are referred to as subconcussions. The hits weren’t big enough to cause a conventional concussion, but can create similar levels of brain impairment as they accumulate.
“These impacts could add up over time and cause something more serious, like changes in dementia, or mental health and suicide,” says D’Arcy.
The findings suggest concussions should be viewed on a spectrum, with varying degrees of harm to the brain, rather than a singular injury you either have or don’t have. Researchers say brain impairment detected by the NeuroCatch technology can then allow medical specialists to tailor adequate treatment for the affected athletes.
“To be able to measure these changes in brain function will allow us to better manage players’ careers and their injury trajectories as well,” says Fickling. “We really want to make sure you allow not just athletes, but people, the required time to recover before going back to activity, and that’s really the key.”
But, you can’t treat what you can’t measure, D’Arcy explains. Now, the focus is on making the Health Canada approved NeuroCatch available to as many athletes as possible, at all skill levels.
“We’re getting them in hockey rinks, fields, clinics and hospitals throughout our country and the U.S. at the moment.”
The research team intends to analyze other contact sports, as the multi-year study continues.
Small bumps and bodychecks in youth hockey can cause brain damage, say researchers
Read more: https://bc.ctvnews.ca/small-bumps-and-b ... -1.5401335
-
greybeard58
- Posts: 2511
- Joined: Sat Aug 21, 2004 11:40 pm
"The more you understand that it’s OK to not be OK—it’s so powerful.”
"The more you understand that it’s OK to not be OK—it’s so powerful.”
The Weight of Gold is an HBO Sports documentary exploring the mental health challenges that Olympic athletes often face. The film comes during a time when the COVID-19 pandemic has postponed the 2020 Tokyo Games — the first such postponement in Olympic history — and greatly exacerbated mental health issues.
The film seeks to inspire discussion about mental health issues, encourage people to seek help, and highlight the need for readily available support. It features accounts from Olympic athletes who share their own struggles with mental health issues, including Michael Phelps, Apolo Ohno, Shaun White, Lolo Jones, Gracie Gold, Katie Uhlaender, Bode Miller, David Boudia, Jeremy Bloom, Sasha Cohen, and, posthumously, Steven Holcomb and Jeret "Speedy" Peterson (via his mother, Linda Peterson).
The Weight of Gold is directed by Brett Rapkin; executive-produced by Michael Phelps, Brett Rapkin, Peter Carlisle and Michael O’Hara Lynch plus executive producers for HBO Peter Nelson and Bentley Weiner; produced by Ellyn Vander Wyden and supervising producer, Jonathan Crystal; edited by James Pilott; narrated by Michael Phelps; with music composed by Simon TaufiQue.
The Weight of Gold
Watch the trailer at: https://www.hbo.com/documentaries/the-weight-of-gold
The Weight of Gold: Panel Discussion feat. Michael Phelps | HBO
Watch the panel discussion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IhgckpatPYY
‘The Weight of Gold’ Is a Wake-up Call for Olympics Fans
For every Michael Phelps, there are multiple hopefuls with two day jobs and a very particular set of skills waiting in the wings for their chance to be the next great someone. (Phelps calls it “an assembly line.”)
Read more: https://www.theringer.com/2020/8/11/213 ... an-stories
The Weight of Gold is an HBO Sports documentary exploring the mental health challenges that Olympic athletes often face. The film comes during a time when the COVID-19 pandemic has postponed the 2020 Tokyo Games — the first such postponement in Olympic history — and greatly exacerbated mental health issues.
The film seeks to inspire discussion about mental health issues, encourage people to seek help, and highlight the need for readily available support. It features accounts from Olympic athletes who share their own struggles with mental health issues, including Michael Phelps, Apolo Ohno, Shaun White, Lolo Jones, Gracie Gold, Katie Uhlaender, Bode Miller, David Boudia, Jeremy Bloom, Sasha Cohen, and, posthumously, Steven Holcomb and Jeret "Speedy" Peterson (via his mother, Linda Peterson).
The Weight of Gold is directed by Brett Rapkin; executive-produced by Michael Phelps, Brett Rapkin, Peter Carlisle and Michael O’Hara Lynch plus executive producers for HBO Peter Nelson and Bentley Weiner; produced by Ellyn Vander Wyden and supervising producer, Jonathan Crystal; edited by James Pilott; narrated by Michael Phelps; with music composed by Simon TaufiQue.
The Weight of Gold
Watch the trailer at: https://www.hbo.com/documentaries/the-weight-of-gold
The Weight of Gold: Panel Discussion feat. Michael Phelps | HBO
Watch the panel discussion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IhgckpatPYY
‘The Weight of Gold’ Is a Wake-up Call for Olympics Fans
For every Michael Phelps, there are multiple hopefuls with two day jobs and a very particular set of skills waiting in the wings for their chance to be the next great someone. (Phelps calls it “an assembly line.”)
Read more: https://www.theringer.com/2020/8/11/213 ... an-stories
-
greybeard58
- Posts: 2511
- Joined: Sat Aug 21, 2004 11:40 pm
Suicide rates in young people declined in Minnesota in 2020
Suicide rates in young people declined in Minnesota in 2020
The COVID-19 pandemic may have been a factor in an 18 percent drop in suicides among children and young adults in Minnesota in 2020 compared to the previous year.
The state Department of Health released data Wednesday for 2020, showing an unexpected decrease in suicides among young people.
The department released suicide totals for people 24 and younger, and expects to release similar statistics later for older people. In Minnesota, children under age 15 generally have low rates of suicide — but they fell even further in 2020 to seven suicides statewide.
Suicides among teenagers between 15 and 19 dropped 16 percent. Statewide, 48 teens died by suicide in 2020.
In the department’s next category — adults age 20 to 24 — suicides dropped by 19 percent, the greatest drop among the young-people categories. Suicides by people 25 to 30 years old dropped 16 percent to 166.
Although the Health Department hasn’t tallied the numbers yet, it is expected that 2020 suicide rates for older people will fall, too. In general, suicides rates in the U.S. increase until about age 50, then dip down for people in their 60s, and rise again for people over age 85.
Experts are grappling with a question: Did the pandemic play a role in reducing suicides in younger people?
Perhaps it’s a side-effect of distance learning, said Patty Schachtner, medical examiner for St. Croix County and former Wisconsin state senator.
She said that some teenagers find it less stressful to be away from school, where they might be bullied. While many teens thrive with in-person learning, some may find distance learning less intimidating.
It also could be because younger people admit they have mental health problems, said Shannah Mulvihill, director of the nonprofit Mental Health Minnesota.
She said that two-thirds of the people taking her online health screenings in 2020 were under age 24.
That’s a sign, she said, that they are more willing to admit they are experiencing mental difficulties.
“There is less of a stigma,” she said. “We have an age group that is more likely to pay attention to the fact they are not doing well, and get help.”
Minnesota has a robust network of helpful agencies, she said, which also helps reduce suicide rates.
Technology, too, favors the young.
Younger people are open to getting help where it’s available, which is increasingly online. “Older people,” said Mulvihill, “are more likely to use the telephone.”
FOR HELP
For anyone with suicidal thoughts, or questions about suicide, hotlines are available:
• Mental Health Minnesota Helpline, 800-862-1799, helpline@mentalhealthmn.org. The website is mentalhealthmn.org.
• National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, 1-800-273-8255, suicidepreventionlifeline.org.
• Crisis Text Line, Text HOME to 741741 in US and Canada, https://www.crisistextline.org
Suicide rates in young people declined in Minnesota in 2020. Could the pandemic be the reason?
Read more: https://www.twincities.com/2021/03/03/s ... he-reason/
If you or someone you know may be considering suicide, contact the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255 or the Crisis Text Line by texting HOME to 741741 to connect with a Crisis Counselor for free 24/7 support.
The COVID-19 pandemic may have been a factor in an 18 percent drop in suicides among children and young adults in Minnesota in 2020 compared to the previous year.
The state Department of Health released data Wednesday for 2020, showing an unexpected decrease in suicides among young people.
The department released suicide totals for people 24 and younger, and expects to release similar statistics later for older people. In Minnesota, children under age 15 generally have low rates of suicide — but they fell even further in 2020 to seven suicides statewide.
Suicides among teenagers between 15 and 19 dropped 16 percent. Statewide, 48 teens died by suicide in 2020.
In the department’s next category — adults age 20 to 24 — suicides dropped by 19 percent, the greatest drop among the young-people categories. Suicides by people 25 to 30 years old dropped 16 percent to 166.
Although the Health Department hasn’t tallied the numbers yet, it is expected that 2020 suicide rates for older people will fall, too. In general, suicides rates in the U.S. increase until about age 50, then dip down for people in their 60s, and rise again for people over age 85.
Experts are grappling with a question: Did the pandemic play a role in reducing suicides in younger people?
Perhaps it’s a side-effect of distance learning, said Patty Schachtner, medical examiner for St. Croix County and former Wisconsin state senator.
She said that some teenagers find it less stressful to be away from school, where they might be bullied. While many teens thrive with in-person learning, some may find distance learning less intimidating.
It also could be because younger people admit they have mental health problems, said Shannah Mulvihill, director of the nonprofit Mental Health Minnesota.
She said that two-thirds of the people taking her online health screenings in 2020 were under age 24.
That’s a sign, she said, that they are more willing to admit they are experiencing mental difficulties.
“There is less of a stigma,” she said. “We have an age group that is more likely to pay attention to the fact they are not doing well, and get help.”
Minnesota has a robust network of helpful agencies, she said, which also helps reduce suicide rates.
Technology, too, favors the young.
Younger people are open to getting help where it’s available, which is increasingly online. “Older people,” said Mulvihill, “are more likely to use the telephone.”
FOR HELP
For anyone with suicidal thoughts, or questions about suicide, hotlines are available:
• Mental Health Minnesota Helpline, 800-862-1799, helpline@mentalhealthmn.org. The website is mentalhealthmn.org.
• National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, 1-800-273-8255, suicidepreventionlifeline.org.
• Crisis Text Line, Text HOME to 741741 in US and Canada, https://www.crisistextline.org
Suicide rates in young people declined in Minnesota in 2020. Could the pandemic be the reason?
Read more: https://www.twincities.com/2021/03/03/s ... he-reason/
If you or someone you know may be considering suicide, contact the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255 or the Crisis Text Line by texting HOME to 741741 to connect with a Crisis Counselor for free 24/7 support.
-
greybeard58
- Posts: 2511
- Joined: Sat Aug 21, 2004 11:40 pm
Why sports concussions are worse for women
Why sports concussions are worse for women
Liz Williams was standing pitchside at a women’s rugby match, and she did not like what she was seeing. Williams, who researches forensic biomechanics at Swansea University, UK, had equipped some of the players with a mouthguard that contained a sensor to measure the speed of head movement. She wanted to understand more about head injuries in the brutal sport. “There were a few instances when my blood went cold,” Williams said.
When the women fell in a tackle, their heads would often whiplash into the ground. The sensors showed that the skull was accelerating — indicating an increased risk of brain injury. But medical staff at the match, not trained to look out for this type of head movement as a cause of injury, deemed the women fine to play on. Such whiplash injuries are much rarer when males play.
Williams’ observations highlight an increasingly apparent problem. A growing body of data suggests that female athletes are at significantly greater risk of a traumatic brain injury event than male athletes. They also fare worse after a concussion and take longer to recover. As researchers gather more data, the picture becomes steadily more alarming.
Female athletes are speaking out about their own experiences, including Sue Lopez, the United Kingdom’s first semi-professional female football player in the 1970s, who now has dementia — a diagnosis she has linked to concussions from heading the ball.
Researchers have offered some explanations for the greater risk to women, although the science is at an early stage. Their ideas range from differences in the microstructure of the brain to the influence of hormones, coaching regimes, players’ level of experience and the management of injuries.
Given that most, if not all, sports-concussion protocols are based on data from men, female athletes ranging from schoolgirls to this year’s Olympic football squads are being put at risk of serious injury. “We take all of these data, primarily from studies on men; we apply them to women. That’s just got to change,” says Michael Grey, who researches rehabilitation neuroscience at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, UK.
Head injuries in sport have had a high profile for many years, with hundreds, if not thousands, of participants in American football, rugby, football, boxing and other sports experiencing dementia or memory loss thought to be linked to recurrent blows to the head decades earlier. Coaching protocols at all levels are changing to try to prevent injury, but these have generally neglected to include a huge cohort: women.
Bigger risk
Studies from US collegiate sports have shown that female athletes are 1.9 times more likely to develop a sports-related concussion than are their male contemporaries in comparable sports1. Those female students also missed many more study days as they recovered. Neuropathologist Willie Stewart at the University of Glasgow, UK, co-authored a study published earlier this year2 of more than 80,000 secondary-school soccer players in the United States, with similar results (see ‘Concussion risk’).
It’s not just the number of head injuries that differs between women and men, but also their nature. A review of 25 studies of sport-related concussion suggests that female athletes are not only more susceptible to concussion than are males, but also sustain more-severe concussions3.
Athletics trainer and sports scientist Tracey Covassin at Michigan State University in East Lansing was one of the first to look at the differences between the sexes, starting in the early 2000s. She was interested in concussion, but noticed that all the data were coming from male-dominated sports in the United States: ice hockey, boxing and American football. In more than 20 papers over almost two decades, Covassin has shown that there are sex differences in concussion rates and recovery times. In 2013, for instance, she published work on concussed soccer players in the United States4, and showed that the female players scored lower in memory tests and experienced more symptoms than did their male contemporaries.
As-yet-unpublished research by Williams on female rugby players — among the first studies to analyze sex-specific mechanisms of head injury in the sport — showed that more than 50% of the 25 female participants experienced injuries caused by their head whiplashing into the ground, whereas only one male player did. “I didn’t expect that. That’s an important discovery,” says Grey, who has seen Williams’s results.
The actions leading to head injuries in female players might also be different. In Stewart’s soccer study2, the girls were most likely to injure themselves when they made contact with an object (such as the ball, when heading it for example), whereas the boys were more likely to make contact with another player. Whether this is a matter of coaching, an individual’s level of playing experience or something else isn’t yet known.
Why women fare worse
The damage that causes concussion can be quite subtle. The brain can’t move that much in the skull, explains Stewart. “The brain virtually fills the intercranial cavity, and there’s a little thin film of fluid that fills up what space is left.” But, in the split second after an impact, the head rapidly decelerates, and the resulting forces transmit deep inside the brain. The gelatinous grey matter undergoes significant shear forces when the head stops suddenly, pushing and pulling the brain tissue in a way that can cause structural damage.
And those forces can affect the brains of men and women in profoundly different ways. Doug Smith at the University of Pennsylvania’s Penn Center for Brain Injury and Repair in Philadelphia uncovered evidence that could be crucial for explaining some of the different outcomes seen in women versus men: their brain cells are structurally different.
Every neuron has a major fiber called the axon, which is responsible for transmitting electrical signals from cell to cell. Damage to axons, through strong shear forces, is thought to be the main reason that concussions occur. “Your brain literally can break,” says Smith, holding up some silly putty during a video call to demonstrate. When stretched gently, the silly putty deforms and then relaxes back into shape. When yanked violently, it snaps.
Inside each axon, tiny protein tunnels, called microtubules, that give cells their structure behave similarly, Smith says. These microtubules, only 25 nanometers wide, carry proteins in the axons and help them to function. If a microtubule is damaged, its protein cargo builds up, causing inflammation and ultimately a breakage, explains Smith. “And if you disconnect an axon, it’s gone forever.”
Smith’s team knew from imaging and brain-tissue studies that axon fibers from the brains of female rats and humans are slimmer than those from males. They wanted to know more about the differences and what effect they might have on brain injury, so they cultured rat neurons and then damaged them by exposing them to a rapid air blast. In the neurons from female rats, the axons were smaller and the microtubules narrower and more susceptible to damage than in the cells from males. The same was true for cultured human neurons5.
Knowing the extent of axonal damage could be an indicator of how well someone could recover from a concussion. In a sports setting, this could be used to determine when an athlete is safe to return to the field, perhaps in the form of a blood test. Smith is now trying to find biomarkers of axonal damage in the blood — for instance, proteins that leak from axons when they are harmed. He’s doing studies on professional ice-hockey players and measuring axonal protein levels in blood before and after injury. “We did find out that some of these proteins and protein fragments, at a certain level, will actually predict who’s going to have a poor outcome,” says Smith.
Grey urges caution in extrapolating too much from Smith’s work on neurons in culture, which is mainly in rats. “Now that’s not to say that I disagree,” he adds. “It’s just that we need to be cautious. This is one study. I personally think there are other issues that are more important.”
One of those might be differences in neck strength, which some researchers think could have a considerable role in mitigating the damage wrought by concussion. Williams’ mouthguard study also measured neck strength to see what sex differences there are. She found that female players’ necks were 47% weaker than men’s. Williams is working on improving neck strength in female rugby players to understand whether specific training could lessen the likelihood of concussion.
Not everyone agrees, however, that neck strength is the problem, or the answer. Stewart isn’t convinced by any of the studies showing that neck strength is a factor in increasing the risk of a concussion, or a factor in improving the outcome of concussions.
Some researchers, including Grey, favour the idea that concussion is aggravated by the hormones that govern the menstrual cycle.
In 2014, Jeff Bazarian, a physician specializing in brain injury at the University of Rochester Medical Center in New York, published a paper6 that showed a clear correlation between the menstrual cycle and how women recover from a traumatic brain injury. His team found that women who arrived at the emergency department with a head injury sustained while they were in the luteal phase of the menstrual cycle, which begins after ovulation and is when progesterone levels are highest, fared worse a month later than did women who hit their heads during the follicular stage, which marks the start of a new cycle and ends at ovulation. Women who were taking oral contraceptives, which balance out hormone levels, also fared better.
Initially, this seems counter-intuitive, because progesterone has been shown to have a neuroprotective effect7, and the luteal phase is when that hormone peaks. But other studies have reported an association between progesterone and concussion8. Martina Anto-Ocrah, a reproductive epidemiologist at the University of Rochester who has continued Bazarian’s work, says this is because the brain injury causes progesterone levels to abruptly plummet9.
Anto-Ocrah became interested in concussion and female sexual health after seeing evidence from the US National Football League that some 30 years after sustaining concussions, male athletes were experiencing low testosterone levels and erectile dysfunction. “But there was nothing in the literature for women. I started thinking, why are we not looking at how concussion affects female reproduction, female menstruation, female sexual health?” she says.
Anto-Ocrah is discovering signs that not only does the menstrual cycle have an impact on concussion but, conversely, head injuries can affect the menstrual cycle and other aspects of reproductive function by interfering with the brain regions that, in tandem with other glands in the body, help to control levels of oestrogen and progesterone.
Treating women differently
One thing scientists agree on is the need for more research about women who sustain head injuries. In sports, this could transform the concussion treatment protocols, recovery experiences and the return to play. In July, World Rugby, rugby union’s global governing body, made a statement committing to conduct research into injury-prevention programmes specific to women, and stressing the need for such initiatives. Grey says he knows of no sports bodies that have actually implemented woman-specific concussion measures or protocols.
Research funders are beginning to recognize the need to study sports concussions separately in men and women. The US National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS) has allotted a total of US$6.8 million over five years to two large projects studying sex differences in concussion and its assessment.
As part of this push for more data, in 2019, Stewart and his collaborator Katherine Snedaker, who runs PINK Concussions, an advocacy group for women’s head injury, put out a call for more female athletes to pledge their brains to the Glasgow traumatic brain-injury archive he curates. Stewart’s team plans to use the archive to investigate further how traumatic brain injury harms brain tissue and alters gene expression, and how it might go on to cause degenerative brain disease. Of the 1,800 or so donated brains in the archive, 75% are from men; fewer than 200 are from athletes and none of those is from a woman, although a number of high-profile UK-based female athletes have pledged their brains, including Scottish footballer Rose Reilly, judo international Connie Ramsay and Scottish rugby star Lee Cockburn.
Prompted by what she saw on the pitch, and facing some enforced downtime during the COVID-19 pandemic, Williams put together a survey of almost 2,000 female rugby players from 56 countries, who answered questions about their experiences of concussion. Early results suggest that players vary hugely in their knowledge of how to recognize and deal with brain injuries.
Williams says that her work, and that of others, is slowly gaining traction. In April, the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand, announced the start of a study in collaboration with World Rugby that will use a mouthguard to quantify aspects of head injuries in both male and female rugby players.
There are bright spots, but at the moment, Grey says, sports bodies mostly ignore the steadily building knowledge about sex differences in concussion. The male game is still the priority, says Stewart. “There’s this general focus on male sport, male injury and male outcomes, and less on female. It’s terrible neglect.”
Why sports concussions are worse for women
As women’s soccer, rugby and other sports gain popularity, scientists are racing to understand how the female brain responds to head injury.
Read more: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02089-2
Nature 596, 26-28 (2021)
doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-021-02089-2
Links for References at https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02089-2
1. Bretzin, A. C. et al. Am. J. Sports Med. 46, 2263–2269 (2018).
2. Bretzin, A. C., Covassin, T., Wiebe, D. J. & Stewart, W. JAMA Netw. Open 4, e218191 (2021).
3. McGroarty, N. K., Brown, S. M. & Mulcahey, M. K. Orthop. J. Sports Med. 8, 2325967120932306 (2020).
4. Covassin, T., Elbin, R. J., Bleecker, A., Lipchik, A. & Kontos, A. P. Am. J. Sports Med. 41, 2890–2895 (2013).
5. Dollé, J.-P. et al. Exp. Neurol. 300, 121–134 (2018).
6. Wunderle, K., Hoeger, K. M., Wasserman, E. & Bazarian, J. J. J. Head Trauma Rehabil. 29, E1–E8 (2014).
7. Wei, J. & Xiao, G.-M. Acta Pharmacol. Sin. 34, 1485–1490 (2013).
8. di Battista, A. P. et al. Sci. Rep. 9, 18605 (2019).
9. Snook, M. L., Henry, L. C., Sanfilippo, J. S., Zeleznik, A. J. & Kontos, A. P. JAMA Pediatr. 171, 879–886 (2017).
Liz Williams was standing pitchside at a women’s rugby match, and she did not like what she was seeing. Williams, who researches forensic biomechanics at Swansea University, UK, had equipped some of the players with a mouthguard that contained a sensor to measure the speed of head movement. She wanted to understand more about head injuries in the brutal sport. “There were a few instances when my blood went cold,” Williams said.
When the women fell in a tackle, their heads would often whiplash into the ground. The sensors showed that the skull was accelerating — indicating an increased risk of brain injury. But medical staff at the match, not trained to look out for this type of head movement as a cause of injury, deemed the women fine to play on. Such whiplash injuries are much rarer when males play.
Williams’ observations highlight an increasingly apparent problem. A growing body of data suggests that female athletes are at significantly greater risk of a traumatic brain injury event than male athletes. They also fare worse after a concussion and take longer to recover. As researchers gather more data, the picture becomes steadily more alarming.
Female athletes are speaking out about their own experiences, including Sue Lopez, the United Kingdom’s first semi-professional female football player in the 1970s, who now has dementia — a diagnosis she has linked to concussions from heading the ball.
Researchers have offered some explanations for the greater risk to women, although the science is at an early stage. Their ideas range from differences in the microstructure of the brain to the influence of hormones, coaching regimes, players’ level of experience and the management of injuries.
Given that most, if not all, sports-concussion protocols are based on data from men, female athletes ranging from schoolgirls to this year’s Olympic football squads are being put at risk of serious injury. “We take all of these data, primarily from studies on men; we apply them to women. That’s just got to change,” says Michael Grey, who researches rehabilitation neuroscience at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, UK.
Head injuries in sport have had a high profile for many years, with hundreds, if not thousands, of participants in American football, rugby, football, boxing and other sports experiencing dementia or memory loss thought to be linked to recurrent blows to the head decades earlier. Coaching protocols at all levels are changing to try to prevent injury, but these have generally neglected to include a huge cohort: women.
Bigger risk
Studies from US collegiate sports have shown that female athletes are 1.9 times more likely to develop a sports-related concussion than are their male contemporaries in comparable sports1. Those female students also missed many more study days as they recovered. Neuropathologist Willie Stewart at the University of Glasgow, UK, co-authored a study published earlier this year2 of more than 80,000 secondary-school soccer players in the United States, with similar results (see ‘Concussion risk’).
It’s not just the number of head injuries that differs between women and men, but also their nature. A review of 25 studies of sport-related concussion suggests that female athletes are not only more susceptible to concussion than are males, but also sustain more-severe concussions3.
Athletics trainer and sports scientist Tracey Covassin at Michigan State University in East Lansing was one of the first to look at the differences between the sexes, starting in the early 2000s. She was interested in concussion, but noticed that all the data were coming from male-dominated sports in the United States: ice hockey, boxing and American football. In more than 20 papers over almost two decades, Covassin has shown that there are sex differences in concussion rates and recovery times. In 2013, for instance, she published work on concussed soccer players in the United States4, and showed that the female players scored lower in memory tests and experienced more symptoms than did their male contemporaries.
As-yet-unpublished research by Williams on female rugby players — among the first studies to analyze sex-specific mechanisms of head injury in the sport — showed that more than 50% of the 25 female participants experienced injuries caused by their head whiplashing into the ground, whereas only one male player did. “I didn’t expect that. That’s an important discovery,” says Grey, who has seen Williams’s results.
The actions leading to head injuries in female players might also be different. In Stewart’s soccer study2, the girls were most likely to injure themselves when they made contact with an object (such as the ball, when heading it for example), whereas the boys were more likely to make contact with another player. Whether this is a matter of coaching, an individual’s level of playing experience or something else isn’t yet known.
Why women fare worse
The damage that causes concussion can be quite subtle. The brain can’t move that much in the skull, explains Stewart. “The brain virtually fills the intercranial cavity, and there’s a little thin film of fluid that fills up what space is left.” But, in the split second after an impact, the head rapidly decelerates, and the resulting forces transmit deep inside the brain. The gelatinous grey matter undergoes significant shear forces when the head stops suddenly, pushing and pulling the brain tissue in a way that can cause structural damage.
And those forces can affect the brains of men and women in profoundly different ways. Doug Smith at the University of Pennsylvania’s Penn Center for Brain Injury and Repair in Philadelphia uncovered evidence that could be crucial for explaining some of the different outcomes seen in women versus men: their brain cells are structurally different.
Every neuron has a major fiber called the axon, which is responsible for transmitting electrical signals from cell to cell. Damage to axons, through strong shear forces, is thought to be the main reason that concussions occur. “Your brain literally can break,” says Smith, holding up some silly putty during a video call to demonstrate. When stretched gently, the silly putty deforms and then relaxes back into shape. When yanked violently, it snaps.
Inside each axon, tiny protein tunnels, called microtubules, that give cells their structure behave similarly, Smith says. These microtubules, only 25 nanometers wide, carry proteins in the axons and help them to function. If a microtubule is damaged, its protein cargo builds up, causing inflammation and ultimately a breakage, explains Smith. “And if you disconnect an axon, it’s gone forever.”
Smith’s team knew from imaging and brain-tissue studies that axon fibers from the brains of female rats and humans are slimmer than those from males. They wanted to know more about the differences and what effect they might have on brain injury, so they cultured rat neurons and then damaged them by exposing them to a rapid air blast. In the neurons from female rats, the axons were smaller and the microtubules narrower and more susceptible to damage than in the cells from males. The same was true for cultured human neurons5.
Knowing the extent of axonal damage could be an indicator of how well someone could recover from a concussion. In a sports setting, this could be used to determine when an athlete is safe to return to the field, perhaps in the form of a blood test. Smith is now trying to find biomarkers of axonal damage in the blood — for instance, proteins that leak from axons when they are harmed. He’s doing studies on professional ice-hockey players and measuring axonal protein levels in blood before and after injury. “We did find out that some of these proteins and protein fragments, at a certain level, will actually predict who’s going to have a poor outcome,” says Smith.
Grey urges caution in extrapolating too much from Smith’s work on neurons in culture, which is mainly in rats. “Now that’s not to say that I disagree,” he adds. “It’s just that we need to be cautious. This is one study. I personally think there are other issues that are more important.”
One of those might be differences in neck strength, which some researchers think could have a considerable role in mitigating the damage wrought by concussion. Williams’ mouthguard study also measured neck strength to see what sex differences there are. She found that female players’ necks were 47% weaker than men’s. Williams is working on improving neck strength in female rugby players to understand whether specific training could lessen the likelihood of concussion.
Not everyone agrees, however, that neck strength is the problem, or the answer. Stewart isn’t convinced by any of the studies showing that neck strength is a factor in increasing the risk of a concussion, or a factor in improving the outcome of concussions.
Some researchers, including Grey, favour the idea that concussion is aggravated by the hormones that govern the menstrual cycle.
In 2014, Jeff Bazarian, a physician specializing in brain injury at the University of Rochester Medical Center in New York, published a paper6 that showed a clear correlation between the menstrual cycle and how women recover from a traumatic brain injury. His team found that women who arrived at the emergency department with a head injury sustained while they were in the luteal phase of the menstrual cycle, which begins after ovulation and is when progesterone levels are highest, fared worse a month later than did women who hit their heads during the follicular stage, which marks the start of a new cycle and ends at ovulation. Women who were taking oral contraceptives, which balance out hormone levels, also fared better.
Initially, this seems counter-intuitive, because progesterone has been shown to have a neuroprotective effect7, and the luteal phase is when that hormone peaks. But other studies have reported an association between progesterone and concussion8. Martina Anto-Ocrah, a reproductive epidemiologist at the University of Rochester who has continued Bazarian’s work, says this is because the brain injury causes progesterone levels to abruptly plummet9.
Anto-Ocrah became interested in concussion and female sexual health after seeing evidence from the US National Football League that some 30 years after sustaining concussions, male athletes were experiencing low testosterone levels and erectile dysfunction. “But there was nothing in the literature for women. I started thinking, why are we not looking at how concussion affects female reproduction, female menstruation, female sexual health?” she says.
Anto-Ocrah is discovering signs that not only does the menstrual cycle have an impact on concussion but, conversely, head injuries can affect the menstrual cycle and other aspects of reproductive function by interfering with the brain regions that, in tandem with other glands in the body, help to control levels of oestrogen and progesterone.
Treating women differently
One thing scientists agree on is the need for more research about women who sustain head injuries. In sports, this could transform the concussion treatment protocols, recovery experiences and the return to play. In July, World Rugby, rugby union’s global governing body, made a statement committing to conduct research into injury-prevention programmes specific to women, and stressing the need for such initiatives. Grey says he knows of no sports bodies that have actually implemented woman-specific concussion measures or protocols.
Research funders are beginning to recognize the need to study sports concussions separately in men and women. The US National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS) has allotted a total of US$6.8 million over five years to two large projects studying sex differences in concussion and its assessment.
As part of this push for more data, in 2019, Stewart and his collaborator Katherine Snedaker, who runs PINK Concussions, an advocacy group for women’s head injury, put out a call for more female athletes to pledge their brains to the Glasgow traumatic brain-injury archive he curates. Stewart’s team plans to use the archive to investigate further how traumatic brain injury harms brain tissue and alters gene expression, and how it might go on to cause degenerative brain disease. Of the 1,800 or so donated brains in the archive, 75% are from men; fewer than 200 are from athletes and none of those is from a woman, although a number of high-profile UK-based female athletes have pledged their brains, including Scottish footballer Rose Reilly, judo international Connie Ramsay and Scottish rugby star Lee Cockburn.
Prompted by what she saw on the pitch, and facing some enforced downtime during the COVID-19 pandemic, Williams put together a survey of almost 2,000 female rugby players from 56 countries, who answered questions about their experiences of concussion. Early results suggest that players vary hugely in their knowledge of how to recognize and deal with brain injuries.
Williams says that her work, and that of others, is slowly gaining traction. In April, the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand, announced the start of a study in collaboration with World Rugby that will use a mouthguard to quantify aspects of head injuries in both male and female rugby players.
There are bright spots, but at the moment, Grey says, sports bodies mostly ignore the steadily building knowledge about sex differences in concussion. The male game is still the priority, says Stewart. “There’s this general focus on male sport, male injury and male outcomes, and less on female. It’s terrible neglect.”
Why sports concussions are worse for women
As women’s soccer, rugby and other sports gain popularity, scientists are racing to understand how the female brain responds to head injury.
Read more: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02089-2
Nature 596, 26-28 (2021)
doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-021-02089-2
Links for References at https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02089-2
1. Bretzin, A. C. et al. Am. J. Sports Med. 46, 2263–2269 (2018).
2. Bretzin, A. C., Covassin, T., Wiebe, D. J. & Stewart, W. JAMA Netw. Open 4, e218191 (2021).
3. McGroarty, N. K., Brown, S. M. & Mulcahey, M. K. Orthop. J. Sports Med. 8, 2325967120932306 (2020).
4. Covassin, T., Elbin, R. J., Bleecker, A., Lipchik, A. & Kontos, A. P. Am. J. Sports Med. 41, 2890–2895 (2013).
5. Dollé, J.-P. et al. Exp. Neurol. 300, 121–134 (2018).
6. Wunderle, K., Hoeger, K. M., Wasserman, E. & Bazarian, J. J. J. Head Trauma Rehabil. 29, E1–E8 (2014).
7. Wei, J. & Xiao, G.-M. Acta Pharmacol. Sin. 34, 1485–1490 (2013).
8. di Battista, A. P. et al. Sci. Rep. 9, 18605 (2019).
9. Snook, M. L., Henry, L. C., Sanfilippo, J. S., Zeleznik, A. J. & Kontos, A. P. JAMA Pediatr. 171, 879–886 (2017).
-
greybeard58
- Posts: 2511
- Joined: Sat Aug 21, 2004 11:40 pm
Number of female teen athletes treated for sports-related head injuries has tripled over past two decades
Number of female teen athletes treated for sports-related head injuries has tripled over past two decades
Reports of head injuries appeared to have surged in young female athletes over a 19-year period, a researcher reported.
The number of female athletes, ages 14-18, who were treated for sports-related concussions and closed-head injuries at U.S. emergency departments (ED) more than tripled, from nearly 10,000 in the year 2000 to over 30,000 in 2019, according to Kevin Pirruccio, MD, a resident at Yale-New Haven Hospital in Connecticut.
Over the 2000-2019 time period, females in that age group made up 40% of all these injuries, Pirruccio and colleagues reported in a poster session at the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons annual meeting. At the time of the study, Pirruccio was at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. Study results were recently published in Research in Sports Medicine.
It's not clear if the rising numbers were due to factors such as increased participation in athletics, more awareness and reporting, or more danger on the field. Still, the findings "should drive further awareness and prevention surrounding the risk of sports-related concussions in females," co-author Robert L. Parisien, MD, of Mt. Sinai Hospital in New York City, told MedPage Today.
The researchers sought to gain insight into concussions among female athletes, a topic that's gotten little attention amid intense focus on male athletes and contact sports like football, Parisien said.
They examined data from the National Electronic Injury Surveillance System, and correlated their estimates to the number of female high-school sports athletes over the 19-year period.
Their weighted estimates of female patients (59% white) presenting with sports-related concussions or closed-head injuries were 9,835 (95% CI 7,105-12,566) for 2000 and 31,751 (95% CI 26,392-37,110) for 2019 with a statistically significant increase (P<0.001).
The sports responsible for the most injuries were soccer (21%), basketball (19%), cheerleading (10%), softball (10%), volleyball (7%), and horseback riding (5%). The activities with the fewest injuries of the 20 listed were swimming, field hockey, general exercise, rugby, and roller skating.
The actual number of injuries is likely significantly higher, Parisien said; half the patients with concussions and closed-head injuries may not make it to the ED, according to the study, although Parisien called that "perfectly appropriate. They're managed by athletic trainers or sports medicine doctors."
While research has shown that females are involved in more sports, this increase in participation doesn't fully explain the growth in cases, Parisien said. "We believe some of that [the increase] may be due to the fact that we do have an increased awareness of concussion and the reporting of concussions," he noted.
The researchers also found that 97% of the patients in the study were released from the ED, and that fewer injuries occurred outside of the traditional school year, in June, July, and August.
Miho J. Tanaka, MD, director of the Women's Sports Medicine Program at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, told MedPage Today that "studies have shown that adolescents may take longer to recover from concussions than adults, and many efforts have been made to identify injury and prevent the long-term consequences that can be associated with concussions."
She added that "women appear to be at greater risk and have more severe and longer lasting impairment after a concussion when compared to men. The exact reasons for this are still being studied." A 2021 study found that females had "significantly worse" cognitive and somatic symptoms than men 12 months after a mild traumatic brain injury.
And a 2020 systematic review of sports-related concussions in females speculated that "possible factors that put female athletes at a higher risk for concussions include biomechanical differences and hormonal differences." The review also noted that while females "are more likely to report a concussion than their male counterparts," underreporting still exists in this population.
Tanaka, who was not involved with the current study, urged physicians to be aware that concussions don't just happen on the football field.
"In this study, noncontact sports such as softball and cheerleading, were found to be commonly associated with this injury," she pointed out. "Physicians should be aware of this fact and understand how to identify and manage such injuries."
Tanaka emphasized that "As the types of sports played by women continues to evolve, it will be important for the medical community to study these injuries and identify ways to optimize care for this growing population of female athletes."
Are Young Female Athletes Taking More Hits to the Head?
Sports-related head injuries in teens estimated to have tripled over past two decades
Read more: https://www.medpagetoday.com/meetingcoverage/aaos/94382
Primary Source: American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons
Sports-Related Concussions in High School Females: An Epidemiologic Analysis of Twenty- Year National Trends Read the study at: https://index.mirasmart.com/AAOS2021/PD ... 000161.PDF
Reports of head injuries appeared to have surged in young female athletes over a 19-year period, a researcher reported.
The number of female athletes, ages 14-18, who were treated for sports-related concussions and closed-head injuries at U.S. emergency departments (ED) more than tripled, from nearly 10,000 in the year 2000 to over 30,000 in 2019, according to Kevin Pirruccio, MD, a resident at Yale-New Haven Hospital in Connecticut.
Over the 2000-2019 time period, females in that age group made up 40% of all these injuries, Pirruccio and colleagues reported in a poster session at the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons annual meeting. At the time of the study, Pirruccio was at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. Study results were recently published in Research in Sports Medicine.
It's not clear if the rising numbers were due to factors such as increased participation in athletics, more awareness and reporting, or more danger on the field. Still, the findings "should drive further awareness and prevention surrounding the risk of sports-related concussions in females," co-author Robert L. Parisien, MD, of Mt. Sinai Hospital in New York City, told MedPage Today.
The researchers sought to gain insight into concussions among female athletes, a topic that's gotten little attention amid intense focus on male athletes and contact sports like football, Parisien said.
They examined data from the National Electronic Injury Surveillance System, and correlated their estimates to the number of female high-school sports athletes over the 19-year period.
Their weighted estimates of female patients (59% white) presenting with sports-related concussions or closed-head injuries were 9,835 (95% CI 7,105-12,566) for 2000 and 31,751 (95% CI 26,392-37,110) for 2019 with a statistically significant increase (P<0.001).
The sports responsible for the most injuries were soccer (21%), basketball (19%), cheerleading (10%), softball (10%), volleyball (7%), and horseback riding (5%). The activities with the fewest injuries of the 20 listed were swimming, field hockey, general exercise, rugby, and roller skating.
The actual number of injuries is likely significantly higher, Parisien said; half the patients with concussions and closed-head injuries may not make it to the ED, according to the study, although Parisien called that "perfectly appropriate. They're managed by athletic trainers or sports medicine doctors."
While research has shown that females are involved in more sports, this increase in participation doesn't fully explain the growth in cases, Parisien said. "We believe some of that [the increase] may be due to the fact that we do have an increased awareness of concussion and the reporting of concussions," he noted.
The researchers also found that 97% of the patients in the study were released from the ED, and that fewer injuries occurred outside of the traditional school year, in June, July, and August.
Miho J. Tanaka, MD, director of the Women's Sports Medicine Program at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, told MedPage Today that "studies have shown that adolescents may take longer to recover from concussions than adults, and many efforts have been made to identify injury and prevent the long-term consequences that can be associated with concussions."
She added that "women appear to be at greater risk and have more severe and longer lasting impairment after a concussion when compared to men. The exact reasons for this are still being studied." A 2021 study found that females had "significantly worse" cognitive and somatic symptoms than men 12 months after a mild traumatic brain injury.
And a 2020 systematic review of sports-related concussions in females speculated that "possible factors that put female athletes at a higher risk for concussions include biomechanical differences and hormonal differences." The review also noted that while females "are more likely to report a concussion than their male counterparts," underreporting still exists in this population.
Tanaka, who was not involved with the current study, urged physicians to be aware that concussions don't just happen on the football field.
"In this study, noncontact sports such as softball and cheerleading, were found to be commonly associated with this injury," she pointed out. "Physicians should be aware of this fact and understand how to identify and manage such injuries."
Tanaka emphasized that "As the types of sports played by women continues to evolve, it will be important for the medical community to study these injuries and identify ways to optimize care for this growing population of female athletes."
Are Young Female Athletes Taking More Hits to the Head?
Sports-related head injuries in teens estimated to have tripled over past two decades
Read more: https://www.medpagetoday.com/meetingcoverage/aaos/94382
Primary Source: American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons
Sports-Related Concussions in High School Females: An Epidemiologic Analysis of Twenty- Year National Trends Read the study at: https://index.mirasmart.com/AAOS2021/PD ... 000161.PDF
-
greybeard58
- Posts: 2511
- Joined: Sat Aug 21, 2004 11:40 pm
concussions ended Megan Doherty’s playing career
concussions ended Megan Doherty’s playing career
After concussions ended Megan Doherty’s playing career at Saint Michael’s College, she moved seamlessly into coaching during her junior season this winter.
Plenty of ex-hockey players transition into coaching. Few of them start when they’re still undergraduates in college.
But that’s the career detour Megan Doherty has taken.
The Stoughton High grad saw her promising playing career at Saint Michael’s College sabotaged by concussions just four games into her sophomore season. Unable to lace up her skates anymore but unwilling to leave the sport behind, Doherty has found a new purpose on the Purple Knights’ coaching staff. This winter she completed her first year as an assistant to head coach Chris Donovan.
“I love it,” said Doherty, who just wrapped up her junior year at the Vermont school. “It was weird at first, just because everything was so new and it was such a new position. So my responsibilities kind of changed over time. But it was a really great experience.”
“I gotta tell you, even though she’s a student, it’s worked out really well,” said Donovan. “She knows her hockey.”
Doherty, a former forward, is behind the bench during games, usually standing behind the forwards. That makes sense since she was one of them until recently.
“When you’re on the ice everything is moving so fast and there’s so much going on that it’s hard to see everything,” Doherty said of her new perspective. “But when you’re on the bench, you can see everything. I’ve definitely learned a lot over the past year. My coaches have acted as mentors to me and they’ve taught me a lot about the game.”
Saint Michael’s had big plans for Doherty as a player, especially after she scored in each of her first two games as a freshman. That fast start made her the first New England Women’s Hockey Alliance (NEWHA) Rookie of the Week in league history on Oct. 24, 2017. But Doherty was always a bit of a risk, having come to the school with three concussions on her resume, the first one way back in seventh grade that knocked her out “for a couple of months.”
Concussion No. 4, a relatively minor one, came during her freshman year at Saint Michael’s. No. 5 hit with a vengeance early in her sophomore season.
“As soon as I hit my head, I knew that I wasn’t going to play anymore,” she said. “I don’t remember exactly (whether I hit my head on the boards or the ice or an opponent). I think it was an open-ice hit, but I can’t remember. That was probably my worst concussion; the recovery was pretty long for that one.
″(After) every concussion I had, I had discussed (quitting hockey) with my family and my doctor. My sophomore year I had to make a difficult decision because at that point it would have been too risky to continue playing. My health was too important.”
Once Doherty had recovered -- she says she has no lingering effects -- Donovan suggested she come behind the bench with him. Once the athletic department higher-ups signed off on the switch, Donovan had a new assistant.
“I’m an old guy, right?” said Donovan, who once played a high school playoff game (for Archbishop Williams) at the old Boston Garden against future NHL player/Bruins coach Robbie Ftorek (of Needham High). “An old guy who’s been doing it for a long time. You need the young people to influence how you think. She worked well with my assistant Maddie (Madelena DeThomasis) who’s 28 or 29 and was quite a player herself. Meg sees things that we don’t see. The more eyes you have, the better off you are.”
Doherty, who lives in Falmouth now, said her interactions with her players, some of whom used to be her teammates, has been smooth.
“I was nervous about it at first,” she said, “but my teammates are very respectful and very understanding. They know that when we’re at hockey I act more as a coach and off the ice we’re all friends and everything’s fine. They sometimes will come to me and ask me questions about what I see on the ice because obviously I can see things a little differently than they can. It’s actually been a really cool experience.
“I kind of act sometimes as a link between the coaches and the players because I’ve been on both sides. It makes it easier sometimes when the girls have questions. They can go through me.”
“I think she did a great job at it,” said defenseman Alissa Sullivan, of Hingham, who graduated as the program’s all-time leader in games played with 107. “Obviously, it was hard to see her not be able to play anymore. But she did find her role as a coach. She knows what she’s talking about. She was a good player when she was on the ice. Her subtle ways of coaching peers, she made a good adjustment. I imagine it was a difficult jump for her, but it never seemed that she felt out of place as a coach.”
Doherty, who played for two years at Stoughton and then for the Walpole Express junior team, said her favorite part of hockey was “battling against the boards and battling in the corners.” Obviously, there’s no more of that, but she is allowed to take the ice during practice.
As for how far she wants to take this coaching thing, that’s to be determined.
“I’m not really sure what I want to do in the future,” she said. “I know that hockey will always be a part of my life, but so much has changed in the past two years that I don’t know where I’ll end up.”
Switch to coaching suits Stoughton’s Doherty
Read more: https://www.patriotledger.com/sports/20 ... ns-doherty
After concussions ended Megan Doherty’s playing career at Saint Michael’s College, she moved seamlessly into coaching during her junior season this winter.
Plenty of ex-hockey players transition into coaching. Few of them start when they’re still undergraduates in college.
But that’s the career detour Megan Doherty has taken.
The Stoughton High grad saw her promising playing career at Saint Michael’s College sabotaged by concussions just four games into her sophomore season. Unable to lace up her skates anymore but unwilling to leave the sport behind, Doherty has found a new purpose on the Purple Knights’ coaching staff. This winter she completed her first year as an assistant to head coach Chris Donovan.
“I love it,” said Doherty, who just wrapped up her junior year at the Vermont school. “It was weird at first, just because everything was so new and it was such a new position. So my responsibilities kind of changed over time. But it was a really great experience.”
“I gotta tell you, even though she’s a student, it’s worked out really well,” said Donovan. “She knows her hockey.”
Doherty, a former forward, is behind the bench during games, usually standing behind the forwards. That makes sense since she was one of them until recently.
“When you’re on the ice everything is moving so fast and there’s so much going on that it’s hard to see everything,” Doherty said of her new perspective. “But when you’re on the bench, you can see everything. I’ve definitely learned a lot over the past year. My coaches have acted as mentors to me and they’ve taught me a lot about the game.”
Saint Michael’s had big plans for Doherty as a player, especially after she scored in each of her first two games as a freshman. That fast start made her the first New England Women’s Hockey Alliance (NEWHA) Rookie of the Week in league history on Oct. 24, 2017. But Doherty was always a bit of a risk, having come to the school with three concussions on her resume, the first one way back in seventh grade that knocked her out “for a couple of months.”
Concussion No. 4, a relatively minor one, came during her freshman year at Saint Michael’s. No. 5 hit with a vengeance early in her sophomore season.
“As soon as I hit my head, I knew that I wasn’t going to play anymore,” she said. “I don’t remember exactly (whether I hit my head on the boards or the ice or an opponent). I think it was an open-ice hit, but I can’t remember. That was probably my worst concussion; the recovery was pretty long for that one.
″(After) every concussion I had, I had discussed (quitting hockey) with my family and my doctor. My sophomore year I had to make a difficult decision because at that point it would have been too risky to continue playing. My health was too important.”
Once Doherty had recovered -- she says she has no lingering effects -- Donovan suggested she come behind the bench with him. Once the athletic department higher-ups signed off on the switch, Donovan had a new assistant.
“I’m an old guy, right?” said Donovan, who once played a high school playoff game (for Archbishop Williams) at the old Boston Garden against future NHL player/Bruins coach Robbie Ftorek (of Needham High). “An old guy who’s been doing it for a long time. You need the young people to influence how you think. She worked well with my assistant Maddie (Madelena DeThomasis) who’s 28 or 29 and was quite a player herself. Meg sees things that we don’t see. The more eyes you have, the better off you are.”
Doherty, who lives in Falmouth now, said her interactions with her players, some of whom used to be her teammates, has been smooth.
“I was nervous about it at first,” she said, “but my teammates are very respectful and very understanding. They know that when we’re at hockey I act more as a coach and off the ice we’re all friends and everything’s fine. They sometimes will come to me and ask me questions about what I see on the ice because obviously I can see things a little differently than they can. It’s actually been a really cool experience.
“I kind of act sometimes as a link between the coaches and the players because I’ve been on both sides. It makes it easier sometimes when the girls have questions. They can go through me.”
“I think she did a great job at it,” said defenseman Alissa Sullivan, of Hingham, who graduated as the program’s all-time leader in games played with 107. “Obviously, it was hard to see her not be able to play anymore. But she did find her role as a coach. She knows what she’s talking about. She was a good player when she was on the ice. Her subtle ways of coaching peers, she made a good adjustment. I imagine it was a difficult jump for her, but it never seemed that she felt out of place as a coach.”
Doherty, who played for two years at Stoughton and then for the Walpole Express junior team, said her favorite part of hockey was “battling against the boards and battling in the corners.” Obviously, there’s no more of that, but she is allowed to take the ice during practice.
As for how far she wants to take this coaching thing, that’s to be determined.
“I’m not really sure what I want to do in the future,” she said. “I know that hockey will always be a part of my life, but so much has changed in the past two years that I don’t know where I’ll end up.”
Switch to coaching suits Stoughton’s Doherty
Read more: https://www.patriotledger.com/sports/20 ... ns-doherty
-
greybeard58
- Posts: 2511
- Joined: Sat Aug 21, 2004 11:40 pm
Hormones May Contribute to Asymmetrical Effects of Brain Injury
Hormones May Contribute to Asymmetrical Effects of Brain Injury
Researchers studying rats claim to have found a novel connection between damage on one side of the brain and problems with the posture or movement of limbs on the opposite side of the body.
Injury to one side of the brain can cause abnormalities in posture or movement on the opposite side of the body. These effects, which are sometimes seen in people who have suffered a stroke or head trauma, have typically been attributed to neural pathways that link the right side of the brain to spinal cord neurons controlling muscles on the left side of the body, and vice versa.
But in a new study on rats that had their spinal cords severed, researchers claim to have discovered another, parallel pathway that triggers opposite-side effects following brain injury and might instead operate via hormones circulating in the blood. The work was published last month (August 10) in eLife.
The findings are “interesting and surprising,” says S. Thomas Carmichael, a neurologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, who was not involved in the work. While this type of proof-of-concept animal study has limited clinical relevance, he adds, the team’s report highlights what could be a novel physiological mechanism. “It puts it on the map as something tractable and worth studying.”
Georgy Bakalkin, a neurobiologist at Uppsala University and author on the new study, tells The Scientist that he has long been interested in the idea that hormones can have effects specific to one side of the body, but that it hasn’t really taken off in neuroscientific fields. While the nervous system is clearly lateralized—the spinal cord is known to be split into left and right, for example—a similar role for hormones in mediating side-specific effects of brain injury or other physiological signals has typically been disregarded, he says.
Looking for such effects in their latest study, Bakalkin and colleagues set up an experiment in which they severed the spinal cords of rats, cutting the main pathway between the brain and the neurons controlling the hind limbs. Then they damaged one side of the brain by surgically removing a small section of the area that controls hind-limb movement.
In rats with intact spinal cords, this kind of one-sided brain injury causes abnormal posture and reflexes in the back leg on the opposite side of the animal’s body. In their paper, the researchers report that the same effect occurs in rats that had had their spinal cords cut, suggesting that the cut part of the spinal cord is somehow bypassed in these animals. (Control animals that had only their spinal cords cut but no brain injury didn’t show the same asymmetry in hind limb responses, Bakalkin says.)
The team next removed the pituitary gland, which releases various hormones from the brain, and repeated their main experiment. In this case, rats with severed spinal cords didn’t show abnormal leg posture following brain injury.
The findings suggest that pituitary hormones are helping transmit information about brain injury to neurons controlling limb movement—something they might do by traveling through the blood to bind to hormone receptors on spinal neurons downstream of where the cut was made, Bakalkin says.
One way this mechanism could result in asymmetrical limb responses would be if the right and left sides of the brain trigger release of different hormones in response to injury, and if the receptors for these hormones are asymmetrically distributed on the spinal cord, such that a right-brain hormone targets the left spinal cord and vice versa.
The researchers didn’t test this idea directly, although they report in their paper that injecting healthy rats with particular pituitary hormones or with blood from brain-injured animals recapitulated the side-specific limb abnormalities. In particular, the hormones β-endorphin and Arg-vasopressin caused the right back leg, but not the left back leg, to contract, they report.
If similar mechanisms operate in humans, it’s conceivable that drugs blocking receptors for particular hormones could help treat some of the physical effects of brain injury, Bakalkin adds. Indeed, in a follow-up experiment, the team reported that drugs inhibiting certain hormone receptors eliminated the hind-leg response in rats that had cut spinal cords and brain injury.
Ramesh Raghupathi, a neuroscientist at Drexel University who was not involved in the work, tells The Scientist that the team’s findings may dovetail with recent research identifying systemic imbalances in pituitary hormones following brain injury. “People have noticed that in patients,” he says, “but it’s never been translated, or reverse translated, into animal studies.”
He adds that for neuroscientists, these kinds of systemic effects are “one of those things that’s there in the background that we recognize. But we never really paid attention to it per se.” While this study is only in rats, he notes that it “shows proof of concept that not everything that happens in the context of brain injury is through the spinal cord in terms of limb function, and that there are external factors.”
Both Raghupathi and Carmichael point out that the team used clear and simple methods, as is appropriate for a proof-of-concept study, but that many aspects of the work, including the type of brain lesion, aren’t relevant to the kinds of injuries seen in humans.
Most of the team’s observations were made over a period of hours, Carmichael says, while the effects of brain injury emerge in people over weeks and months, “so there’s a temporal element that they haven’t even approached.” It’s also unclear how hormones might carry information about brain injury. They could perhaps trigger changes in synaptic strength or in the structural organization of neurons controlling motor responses, Carmichael says, but “it’s hard to know exactly what the actual cellular mechanism is.”
Bakalkin agrees that there’s more to be done to investigate the mechanisms underlying the effects his group reported. In addition to identifying specific hormones released following brain injury, the researchers want to work out how those hormones encode information about the side of the brain, and how that could translate into side-specific effects on limbs. The team has also been running experiments to make extra sure they haven’t missed any other neural pathways that could bypass the spinal cord cut.
In the meantime, the study’s a useful reminder for researchers using animal models that left and right aren’t necessarily equivalent, Raghupathi says. “When people do unilateral brain injuries, some people do the left side, some people do the right side,” he says. “There’s always been this idea that for a rat, it really doesn’t matter.”
Hormones May Contribute to Asymmetrical Effects of Brain Injury
Read more: https://www.the-scientist.com/news-opin ... jury-69150
Neurohormones: A major new dimension in the problem of brain injury
Read the study: https://elifesciences.org/articles/72048
Researchers studying rats claim to have found a novel connection between damage on one side of the brain and problems with the posture or movement of limbs on the opposite side of the body.
Injury to one side of the brain can cause abnormalities in posture or movement on the opposite side of the body. These effects, which are sometimes seen in people who have suffered a stroke or head trauma, have typically been attributed to neural pathways that link the right side of the brain to spinal cord neurons controlling muscles on the left side of the body, and vice versa.
But in a new study on rats that had their spinal cords severed, researchers claim to have discovered another, parallel pathway that triggers opposite-side effects following brain injury and might instead operate via hormones circulating in the blood. The work was published last month (August 10) in eLife.
The findings are “interesting and surprising,” says S. Thomas Carmichael, a neurologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, who was not involved in the work. While this type of proof-of-concept animal study has limited clinical relevance, he adds, the team’s report highlights what could be a novel physiological mechanism. “It puts it on the map as something tractable and worth studying.”
Georgy Bakalkin, a neurobiologist at Uppsala University and author on the new study, tells The Scientist that he has long been interested in the idea that hormones can have effects specific to one side of the body, but that it hasn’t really taken off in neuroscientific fields. While the nervous system is clearly lateralized—the spinal cord is known to be split into left and right, for example—a similar role for hormones in mediating side-specific effects of brain injury or other physiological signals has typically been disregarded, he says.
Looking for such effects in their latest study, Bakalkin and colleagues set up an experiment in which they severed the spinal cords of rats, cutting the main pathway between the brain and the neurons controlling the hind limbs. Then they damaged one side of the brain by surgically removing a small section of the area that controls hind-limb movement.
In rats with intact spinal cords, this kind of one-sided brain injury causes abnormal posture and reflexes in the back leg on the opposite side of the animal’s body. In their paper, the researchers report that the same effect occurs in rats that had had their spinal cords cut, suggesting that the cut part of the spinal cord is somehow bypassed in these animals. (Control animals that had only their spinal cords cut but no brain injury didn’t show the same asymmetry in hind limb responses, Bakalkin says.)
The team next removed the pituitary gland, which releases various hormones from the brain, and repeated their main experiment. In this case, rats with severed spinal cords didn’t show abnormal leg posture following brain injury.
The findings suggest that pituitary hormones are helping transmit information about brain injury to neurons controlling limb movement—something they might do by traveling through the blood to bind to hormone receptors on spinal neurons downstream of where the cut was made, Bakalkin says.
One way this mechanism could result in asymmetrical limb responses would be if the right and left sides of the brain trigger release of different hormones in response to injury, and if the receptors for these hormones are asymmetrically distributed on the spinal cord, such that a right-brain hormone targets the left spinal cord and vice versa.
The researchers didn’t test this idea directly, although they report in their paper that injecting healthy rats with particular pituitary hormones or with blood from brain-injured animals recapitulated the side-specific limb abnormalities. In particular, the hormones β-endorphin and Arg-vasopressin caused the right back leg, but not the left back leg, to contract, they report.
If similar mechanisms operate in humans, it’s conceivable that drugs blocking receptors for particular hormones could help treat some of the physical effects of brain injury, Bakalkin adds. Indeed, in a follow-up experiment, the team reported that drugs inhibiting certain hormone receptors eliminated the hind-leg response in rats that had cut spinal cords and brain injury.
Ramesh Raghupathi, a neuroscientist at Drexel University who was not involved in the work, tells The Scientist that the team’s findings may dovetail with recent research identifying systemic imbalances in pituitary hormones following brain injury. “People have noticed that in patients,” he says, “but it’s never been translated, or reverse translated, into animal studies.”
He adds that for neuroscientists, these kinds of systemic effects are “one of those things that’s there in the background that we recognize. But we never really paid attention to it per se.” While this study is only in rats, he notes that it “shows proof of concept that not everything that happens in the context of brain injury is through the spinal cord in terms of limb function, and that there are external factors.”
Both Raghupathi and Carmichael point out that the team used clear and simple methods, as is appropriate for a proof-of-concept study, but that many aspects of the work, including the type of brain lesion, aren’t relevant to the kinds of injuries seen in humans.
Most of the team’s observations were made over a period of hours, Carmichael says, while the effects of brain injury emerge in people over weeks and months, “so there’s a temporal element that they haven’t even approached.” It’s also unclear how hormones might carry information about brain injury. They could perhaps trigger changes in synaptic strength or in the structural organization of neurons controlling motor responses, Carmichael says, but “it’s hard to know exactly what the actual cellular mechanism is.”
Bakalkin agrees that there’s more to be done to investigate the mechanisms underlying the effects his group reported. In addition to identifying specific hormones released following brain injury, the researchers want to work out how those hormones encode information about the side of the brain, and how that could translate into side-specific effects on limbs. The team has also been running experiments to make extra sure they haven’t missed any other neural pathways that could bypass the spinal cord cut.
In the meantime, the study’s a useful reminder for researchers using animal models that left and right aren’t necessarily equivalent, Raghupathi says. “When people do unilateral brain injuries, some people do the left side, some people do the right side,” he says. “There’s always been this idea that for a rat, it really doesn’t matter.”
Hormones May Contribute to Asymmetrical Effects of Brain Injury
Read more: https://www.the-scientist.com/news-opin ... jury-69150
Neurohormones: A major new dimension in the problem of brain injury
Read the study: https://elifesciences.org/articles/72048
-
greybeard58
- Posts: 2511
- Joined: Sat Aug 21, 2004 11:40 pm
How concussions ended the careers of 10 pro athletes
For many athletes, the terms “shake it off” and “you’re fine, get back out there” were thought to instill a toughness that was simply a part of sports. What the sporting world has learned in the past decade or two, however, is that athletes were often doing irreparable damage to their brains when they shook off head and neck injuries.
Mild traumatic brain injury, also known as a concussion, causes the brain to move quickly inside of the skull. Symptoms of a concussion include nausea, headache, fatigue, confusion, sleep disturbances, mood changes, and memory problems.
Multiple concussions can lead to lasting and significant brain injury. One condition, known as chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), has gained a great deal of attention with major athletes such as Aaron Hernandez exhibiting personality changes and violent behavior, including death by suicide. Hernandez had a severe case of CTE. Diagnosing CTE with certainty only happens postmortem, and many professional athletes who have struggled with brain injuries have agreed to donate their brains to medical research after death.
While high-contact sports like football, rugby, soccer, and hockey have a higher rate of concussions, other sports such as wrestling, gymnastics, lacrosse, and even cheerleading also pose a risk for mild to severe brain injuries. With awareness of concussions and other brain injuries shaking up the sports world, attempts are being made to make youth and professional athletes safer.
Youth and high school sports have changed many rules and adopted safety measures to protect against mild and traumatic brain injury. Concussion training is provided to youth sport coaches to educate them about the injury. Sports federations are implementing stricter guidelines, too, such as the 2015 U.S. Soccer Federation’s decision to ban heading the ball in youth soccer.
To shine a light on concussions in sports, Neural Effects compiled a list of professional athletes who have suffered from career-ending concussion-related injuries.
Ryan Miller
Sport: Football (Denver Broncos)
Ryan Miller, former Denver Broncos football player.
John Leyba // Getty Images
Offensive guard Ryan Miller played eight games as a rookie for the Cleveland Browns, but it was after he ended up with the Dallas Cowboys that he vomited and lost his balance after a 2015 summer practice. He was cut by the Cowboys two months later. At first, Miller kept quiet about his suffering, but in 2017, he told the Denver Post, “You want to fight and fight and fight and fight until basically you can’t any longer. But when it comes to mental health and concussions, sometimes nobody will know but you, and it takes a tremendous amount of courage to stand up and say something about it.”
Diagnosed with post-concussion syndrome (PCS), he has faced migraines, seizures, and memory loss. The NFL player believes it all began in 2013 after a blow to the head at training camp for the Browns, which turned out to be a concussion.
Miller has vowed to donate his brain for research after his death through the Concussion Legacy Foundation, where they will check for chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a progressive brain condition believed to be brought on by repeated blows to the head and multiple concussions. Football players are particularly at risk of concussions due to the amount of contact and the severity of the impact of the blows the players sustain.
Adam Deadmarsh
Sport: Ice hockey (Los Angeles Kings)
Adam Deadmarsh, former Los Angeles Kings ice hockey player.
Jeff Gross // Getty Images
Adam Deadmarsh played right wing for not only the Kings but the Colorado Avalanche, including the Avalanche team that won the Stanley Cup in 1996. He also made two U.S. Olympic team appearances and played for the Quebec Nordiques, where he was a first-round draft pick at 14th overall in the 1993 NHL Entry Draft. Deadmarsh’s first concussion came after a fight with Ed Jovanovski of Vancouver in November 2000. It was during the 2002–2003 season that his NHL career really came to an end when an accidental kick to the head by a Kings’ teammate caused his second concussion—though Deadmarsh didn’t retire until 2005.
Coaching for the Avalanche offered him a way to remain in the game, but in 2012 that career move was also cut short by post-concussion symptoms. Eventually, Deadmarsh was able to return to coaching as the assistant coach of the Spokane Chiefs in 2018.
Ellie Furneaux
Sport: Skeleton (Team Great Britain)
Ellie Furneaux, former Skeleton with Team Great Britain.
Ian MacNicol // Getty Images
Ellie Furneaux has struggled with painful and debilitating headaches and migraines ever since the accident that ended her career in skeleton. The winter sliding sport features riders mounting a skeleton bobsled face-down and going headfirst down a frozen track. Furneaux’s 2018 career-ending accident came in Germany when she smashed into the ice during a race. But looking back, the elite athlete realized that the many races and practices leading up to that incident were also part of the problem.
Even before her accident, Furneaux believes she may have been suffering from brain injury for much longer, though often in sports, these injuries are ignored or misinterpreted. The International Bobsled and Skeleton Federation has been dealing with mounting evidence that brain injuries are a continuous and serious problem with sliding sports, and there is even a term in the industry for those who suffer from chronic concussions and head injuries: “sledheads.”
Since Furneaux’s accident, many people involved in the sport are trying to make checks for brain injuries a regular practice and encourage those involved at the highest level of the sport to set training limits and conduct more brain injury research. As for Furneaux, she retired from the sport at the age of 24 in February 2019 after doctors told her she should never sled again.
Sean Morey
Sport: Football (Seattle Seahawks)
Sean Morey, former Seattle Seahawks football player.
Stephen Dunn // Getty Images
Doctors advised Sean Morey to retire from the NFL in 2010 due to his post-concussion syndrome. Morey wanted to prevent what he had seen happen to many other NFL players who were diagnosed with chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) after their deaths. The wide receiver was small for the NFL at 190 pounds and 5 feet, 10 inches, though he was known for his ability to hit and block.
In 2009, in his last season of play, Morey suffered four concussions during a single game. He now struggles with explosive anger, migraines, and memory and focus issues, which impact his wife and children. The former Seahawk and Arizona Cardinal is taking action as the founder of the NFL Players Association’s committee on traumatic brain injury, where he not only encourages others like him to get involved but has vowed to donate his brain for research after his death.
Joshua Farris
Sport: Figure skating (Team USA)
Joshua Farris, former figure skater with Team USA.
JUNG YEON-JE // Getty Images
In 2013, Joshua Farris was the world junior figure skating champion, and in 2015, took home the bronze from the U.S. Figure Skating Championships. However, a fall during an attempted quadruple jump during practice caused a concussion—and during that same period, he incurred two more concussions, which led to significant health issues.
In 2016, he retired from figure skating at 21, just as his career was taking off. Later that year, he resumed skating and hoped to return the following season, but symptoms from his brain injuries had not gone away as he’d hoped. According to a GoFundMe page set up for the athlete, Farris had damage to his sixth cranial nerve and right eye and had a herniated disk. The page was set up to raise money for eye and brain surgery.
Josephine Pucci
Sport: Ice hockey (Team USA)
Josephine Pucci, former ice hockey player with Team USA.
Bruce Bennett // Getty Images
In 2014, Josephine Pucci won a silver medal at the Sochi Winter Olympics, where she played for the U.S. women’s hockey team—against all odds. The defensewoman had to work her way back from a traumatic brain injury sustained while playing for Harvard.
Unfortunately, 2014 was also the year when the Olympian was forced to retire from hockey. Multiple concussions had caused a brain injury, which brought on symptoms including fatigue and nausea and made reading and walking difficult. Pucci went on to cofound a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, the Headway Foundation, where she continues to raise awareness about concussions and traumatic brain injuries.
Gretchen Bleiler
Sport: Snowboarding (Team USA)
Gretchen Bleiler, former snowboarder with Team USA.
Harry How // Getty Images
After a 13-year career in competitive snowboarding, Gretchen Bleiler retired. Although she suffered from multiple concussions, Bleiler never considered herself a traumatic brain injury (TBI) victim until she learned more about TBI through LoveYourBrain, a nonprofit dedicated to educating and empowering people about brain health and TBI.
The athlete also admits that she didn’t pay attention to her concussions in the way that she probably should have as over a five-month period, she had four concussions, which ultimately led to her retirement from the sport in 2014. In a 2017 article for ESPN, she wrote, “While I have healed from my head injuries, I carry them with me every single day.” The Olympic silver-medal winner now lives in Colorado and is an entrepreneur, environmental advocate, and motivational speaker.
Tory Nyhaug
Sport: BMX (Team Canada)
Tory Nyhaug, former BMX with Team Canada.
Jamie Squire // Getty Images
Two-time Canadian Olympian Tory Nyhaug announced his retirement from BMX racing in 2019 at the age of 27. Nyhaug still struggles with post-concussion symptoms triggered by a 2018 crash at the World Championships. He retired because he didn’t want to risk another concussion.
In an Instagram post, Nyhaug told fans about his long journey back to health while stating that he doesn’t believe the racing world owes him a thing. He understood the risks associated with the sport and said he has no regrets. Nyhaug continues to remain involved with BMX racing as a coach and is helping to train the next generation.
Kat Merchant
Sport: Rugby (England women’s national rugby union team)
Kat Merchant, former rugby player with England women’s national rugby union team.
Christian Liewig – Corbis // Getty Images
Gloucester-born Kat Merchant won the World Cup in 2014. Soon after, she retired on the advice of medical doctors who were worried about the 11 concussions she incurred in just 14 seasons. The call by brain injury advocacy groups like Headway for more research into how brain injury impacts women athletes—and whether they are more susceptible to concussions than their male counterparts—has prompted Merchant to become more vocal about her concussions and the impact they’ve had on her life since she went into retirement.
The athlete told BBC Radio 5 Live, “I have a lower cognitive capacity…I can’t do a hundred things at once without getting a headache or getting flustered or forgetting my words.” Merchant now works as a personal trainer.
Briana Scurry
Sport: Soccer (U.S. women’s national soccer team)
Briana Scurry, former soccer player with the U.S. women’s national soccer team.
David Madison // Getty Images
Briana Scurry’s recovery from the career-ending concussion she suffered in 2010 took years. Before Scurry played professional soccer, she won two Olympic gold medals as the starting goalkeeper for the U.S. women’s national soccer team. Playing for the Washington Freedom against the Philadelphia Independence, Scurry and Philadelphia’s forward collided, causing a concussion the soccer star didn’t know about until the symptoms showed up later, including loss of balance and nausea.
After retiring, Scurry suffered from headaches and permanent nerve damage and was diagnosed with post-concussion syndrome. Only after her occipital nerves were surgically removed in 2013 did Scurry feel any relief from the pain. While Scurry, now an advocate for safety in soccer, was pleased with the 2015 decision by the U.S. Soccer Federation to ban heading the ball in youth soccer, she advocates the mandatory use of headgear in the sport for all ages.
Post navigation
How to Test for a Concussion
https://neuraleffects.com/blog/how-conc ... -athletes/
Mild traumatic brain injury, also known as a concussion, causes the brain to move quickly inside of the skull. Symptoms of a concussion include nausea, headache, fatigue, confusion, sleep disturbances, mood changes, and memory problems.
Multiple concussions can lead to lasting and significant brain injury. One condition, known as chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), has gained a great deal of attention with major athletes such as Aaron Hernandez exhibiting personality changes and violent behavior, including death by suicide. Hernandez had a severe case of CTE. Diagnosing CTE with certainty only happens postmortem, and many professional athletes who have struggled with brain injuries have agreed to donate their brains to medical research after death.
While high-contact sports like football, rugby, soccer, and hockey have a higher rate of concussions, other sports such as wrestling, gymnastics, lacrosse, and even cheerleading also pose a risk for mild to severe brain injuries. With awareness of concussions and other brain injuries shaking up the sports world, attempts are being made to make youth and professional athletes safer.
Youth and high school sports have changed many rules and adopted safety measures to protect against mild and traumatic brain injury. Concussion training is provided to youth sport coaches to educate them about the injury. Sports federations are implementing stricter guidelines, too, such as the 2015 U.S. Soccer Federation’s decision to ban heading the ball in youth soccer.
To shine a light on concussions in sports, Neural Effects compiled a list of professional athletes who have suffered from career-ending concussion-related injuries.
Ryan Miller
Sport: Football (Denver Broncos)
Ryan Miller, former Denver Broncos football player.
John Leyba // Getty Images
Offensive guard Ryan Miller played eight games as a rookie for the Cleveland Browns, but it was after he ended up with the Dallas Cowboys that he vomited and lost his balance after a 2015 summer practice. He was cut by the Cowboys two months later. At first, Miller kept quiet about his suffering, but in 2017, he told the Denver Post, “You want to fight and fight and fight and fight until basically you can’t any longer. But when it comes to mental health and concussions, sometimes nobody will know but you, and it takes a tremendous amount of courage to stand up and say something about it.”
Diagnosed with post-concussion syndrome (PCS), he has faced migraines, seizures, and memory loss. The NFL player believes it all began in 2013 after a blow to the head at training camp for the Browns, which turned out to be a concussion.
Miller has vowed to donate his brain for research after his death through the Concussion Legacy Foundation, where they will check for chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a progressive brain condition believed to be brought on by repeated blows to the head and multiple concussions. Football players are particularly at risk of concussions due to the amount of contact and the severity of the impact of the blows the players sustain.
Adam Deadmarsh
Sport: Ice hockey (Los Angeles Kings)
Adam Deadmarsh, former Los Angeles Kings ice hockey player.
Jeff Gross // Getty Images
Adam Deadmarsh played right wing for not only the Kings but the Colorado Avalanche, including the Avalanche team that won the Stanley Cup in 1996. He also made two U.S. Olympic team appearances and played for the Quebec Nordiques, where he was a first-round draft pick at 14th overall in the 1993 NHL Entry Draft. Deadmarsh’s first concussion came after a fight with Ed Jovanovski of Vancouver in November 2000. It was during the 2002–2003 season that his NHL career really came to an end when an accidental kick to the head by a Kings’ teammate caused his second concussion—though Deadmarsh didn’t retire until 2005.
Coaching for the Avalanche offered him a way to remain in the game, but in 2012 that career move was also cut short by post-concussion symptoms. Eventually, Deadmarsh was able to return to coaching as the assistant coach of the Spokane Chiefs in 2018.
Ellie Furneaux
Sport: Skeleton (Team Great Britain)
Ellie Furneaux, former Skeleton with Team Great Britain.
Ian MacNicol // Getty Images
Ellie Furneaux has struggled with painful and debilitating headaches and migraines ever since the accident that ended her career in skeleton. The winter sliding sport features riders mounting a skeleton bobsled face-down and going headfirst down a frozen track. Furneaux’s 2018 career-ending accident came in Germany when she smashed into the ice during a race. But looking back, the elite athlete realized that the many races and practices leading up to that incident were also part of the problem.
Even before her accident, Furneaux believes she may have been suffering from brain injury for much longer, though often in sports, these injuries are ignored or misinterpreted. The International Bobsled and Skeleton Federation has been dealing with mounting evidence that brain injuries are a continuous and serious problem with sliding sports, and there is even a term in the industry for those who suffer from chronic concussions and head injuries: “sledheads.”
Since Furneaux’s accident, many people involved in the sport are trying to make checks for brain injuries a regular practice and encourage those involved at the highest level of the sport to set training limits and conduct more brain injury research. As for Furneaux, she retired from the sport at the age of 24 in February 2019 after doctors told her she should never sled again.
Sean Morey
Sport: Football (Seattle Seahawks)
Sean Morey, former Seattle Seahawks football player.
Stephen Dunn // Getty Images
Doctors advised Sean Morey to retire from the NFL in 2010 due to his post-concussion syndrome. Morey wanted to prevent what he had seen happen to many other NFL players who were diagnosed with chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) after their deaths. The wide receiver was small for the NFL at 190 pounds and 5 feet, 10 inches, though he was known for his ability to hit and block.
In 2009, in his last season of play, Morey suffered four concussions during a single game. He now struggles with explosive anger, migraines, and memory and focus issues, which impact his wife and children. The former Seahawk and Arizona Cardinal is taking action as the founder of the NFL Players Association’s committee on traumatic brain injury, where he not only encourages others like him to get involved but has vowed to donate his brain for research after his death.
Joshua Farris
Sport: Figure skating (Team USA)
Joshua Farris, former figure skater with Team USA.
JUNG YEON-JE // Getty Images
In 2013, Joshua Farris was the world junior figure skating champion, and in 2015, took home the bronze from the U.S. Figure Skating Championships. However, a fall during an attempted quadruple jump during practice caused a concussion—and during that same period, he incurred two more concussions, which led to significant health issues.
In 2016, he retired from figure skating at 21, just as his career was taking off. Later that year, he resumed skating and hoped to return the following season, but symptoms from his brain injuries had not gone away as he’d hoped. According to a GoFundMe page set up for the athlete, Farris had damage to his sixth cranial nerve and right eye and had a herniated disk. The page was set up to raise money for eye and brain surgery.
Josephine Pucci
Sport: Ice hockey (Team USA)
Josephine Pucci, former ice hockey player with Team USA.
Bruce Bennett // Getty Images
In 2014, Josephine Pucci won a silver medal at the Sochi Winter Olympics, where she played for the U.S. women’s hockey team—against all odds. The defensewoman had to work her way back from a traumatic brain injury sustained while playing for Harvard.
Unfortunately, 2014 was also the year when the Olympian was forced to retire from hockey. Multiple concussions had caused a brain injury, which brought on symptoms including fatigue and nausea and made reading and walking difficult. Pucci went on to cofound a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, the Headway Foundation, where she continues to raise awareness about concussions and traumatic brain injuries.
Gretchen Bleiler
Sport: Snowboarding (Team USA)
Gretchen Bleiler, former snowboarder with Team USA.
Harry How // Getty Images
After a 13-year career in competitive snowboarding, Gretchen Bleiler retired. Although she suffered from multiple concussions, Bleiler never considered herself a traumatic brain injury (TBI) victim until she learned more about TBI through LoveYourBrain, a nonprofit dedicated to educating and empowering people about brain health and TBI.
The athlete also admits that she didn’t pay attention to her concussions in the way that she probably should have as over a five-month period, she had four concussions, which ultimately led to her retirement from the sport in 2014. In a 2017 article for ESPN, she wrote, “While I have healed from my head injuries, I carry them with me every single day.” The Olympic silver-medal winner now lives in Colorado and is an entrepreneur, environmental advocate, and motivational speaker.
Tory Nyhaug
Sport: BMX (Team Canada)
Tory Nyhaug, former BMX with Team Canada.
Jamie Squire // Getty Images
Two-time Canadian Olympian Tory Nyhaug announced his retirement from BMX racing in 2019 at the age of 27. Nyhaug still struggles with post-concussion symptoms triggered by a 2018 crash at the World Championships. He retired because he didn’t want to risk another concussion.
In an Instagram post, Nyhaug told fans about his long journey back to health while stating that he doesn’t believe the racing world owes him a thing. He understood the risks associated with the sport and said he has no regrets. Nyhaug continues to remain involved with BMX racing as a coach and is helping to train the next generation.
Kat Merchant
Sport: Rugby (England women’s national rugby union team)
Kat Merchant, former rugby player with England women’s national rugby union team.
Christian Liewig – Corbis // Getty Images
Gloucester-born Kat Merchant won the World Cup in 2014. Soon after, she retired on the advice of medical doctors who were worried about the 11 concussions she incurred in just 14 seasons. The call by brain injury advocacy groups like Headway for more research into how brain injury impacts women athletes—and whether they are more susceptible to concussions than their male counterparts—has prompted Merchant to become more vocal about her concussions and the impact they’ve had on her life since she went into retirement.
The athlete told BBC Radio 5 Live, “I have a lower cognitive capacity…I can’t do a hundred things at once without getting a headache or getting flustered or forgetting my words.” Merchant now works as a personal trainer.
Briana Scurry
Sport: Soccer (U.S. women’s national soccer team)
Briana Scurry, former soccer player with the U.S. women’s national soccer team.
David Madison // Getty Images
Briana Scurry’s recovery from the career-ending concussion she suffered in 2010 took years. Before Scurry played professional soccer, she won two Olympic gold medals as the starting goalkeeper for the U.S. women’s national soccer team. Playing for the Washington Freedom against the Philadelphia Independence, Scurry and Philadelphia’s forward collided, causing a concussion the soccer star didn’t know about until the symptoms showed up later, including loss of balance and nausea.
After retiring, Scurry suffered from headaches and permanent nerve damage and was diagnosed with post-concussion syndrome. Only after her occipital nerves were surgically removed in 2013 did Scurry feel any relief from the pain. While Scurry, now an advocate for safety in soccer, was pleased with the 2015 decision by the U.S. Soccer Federation to ban heading the ball in youth soccer, she advocates the mandatory use of headgear in the sport for all ages.
Post navigation
How to Test for a Concussion
https://neuraleffects.com/blog/how-conc ... -athletes/
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greybeard58
- Posts: 2511
- Joined: Sat Aug 21, 2004 11:40 pm
Four concussions by 21: Hutt specialist finds women take a month to recover
Four concussions by 21: Hutt specialist finds women take a month to recover
Danica Tavite stood up after making the tackle and didn’t think anything was wrong. Then she couldn’t recognize her team medic.
The 21-year-old wing and fullback had just had her fourth concussion in five years.
“I tried to play it off, but it got to the point where I got a bit dizzy,” Tavite, who plays for the Hutt Old Boys Marist Women’s team, said.
The team’s medic Doug King had been watching from the sidelines and had seen her make the tackle. It was an unremarkable hit– nothing had looked dangerous. But Tavite had landed on her shoulder and hit her head.
“I walked across and she just looked at me like ‘who the hell are you?’ And I said right, fine, come with me’," King said.
Although this was three months ago, Tavite said she still experiences headaches, migraines, drowsiness and struggles to concentrate for long periods.
She didn't play for the rest of the season and is now questioning whether she wants to keep playing the sport she loves.
Bernie Tavite, who’s the team’s former manager, said it has been unsettling seeing her daughter still weathering the effects of the injuries.
“She says, I’m feeling this way and I don’t know why.”
Her daughter has days which are a mental battle and she’ll withdraw, Bernie Tavite said.
“It’s a serious, serious brain injury. We’ve taken it very seriously with our team.”
New Zealand Rugby concussion guidelines outline players must be benched for 21 days, but can return after that with medical clearance.
King, who works as a clinical nurse specialist at Hutt Hospital’s emergency department, has just published research that suggests those guidelines don’t account for women’s average recovery time.
His PhD research followed 40 Wellington women’s club rugby players through a season and found they took an average of 28.9 days before they were fit to play again. He tested their abilities through an international standard known as the King-Devick test, which can be done on the sideline and asks players to rapidly read numbers scattered across a screen.
“The international consensus on concussion says 80 per cent will resolve in seven to 10 days. But here I’m finding this cohort of players – at 10 days they're at their worst. Everything is set on what’s been tested before and it’s always been tested on males.”
A common misconception is that concussion requires a head knock, but that’s not always the case, King said. This means things like a low tackle, a shoulder hitting the ground, even an upright heavy landing can cause concussion, he said.
“If I have a block of jelly inside a case, I can make the case stronger, but hit the case and it’s still going to wobble.”
There’s also a perception the injury is a respectable battle scar and that needs to change, he said.
“It’s not a badge of honour. It’s a silent epidemic and people need to be more aware of it.”
The two days immediately following the injury is crucial for starting work with physiotherapists, he said. While rest is important, plonking yourself in front of a screen can be dangerous.
“Don’t go to work for a week, don’t go to school for a week you need to recover. In that week you need cognitive rest –so no TVs, playstation, anything like that - but do your walks – walking around the house, walking around the block, and increase it slowly.”
King has just been named in the top 0.5 per cent of international experts on concussion by medical ranking site Expertscape. His research into women’s concussion has just been published in the international journal, JSM Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation.
Despite his knowledge, King admits to sniffing bath salts during his rugby days to perk himself up after a head knock, but said he’s now committed to changing that mentality among players.
“When I look back at it now, I don’t know why I kept playing. It’s a tough guy mentality and a tough girl mentality.”
Four concussions by 21: Hutt specialist finds women take a month to recover
Read more: https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/health ... to-recover
Danica Tavite stood up after making the tackle and didn’t think anything was wrong. Then she couldn’t recognize her team medic.
The 21-year-old wing and fullback had just had her fourth concussion in five years.
“I tried to play it off, but it got to the point where I got a bit dizzy,” Tavite, who plays for the Hutt Old Boys Marist Women’s team, said.
The team’s medic Doug King had been watching from the sidelines and had seen her make the tackle. It was an unremarkable hit– nothing had looked dangerous. But Tavite had landed on her shoulder and hit her head.
“I walked across and she just looked at me like ‘who the hell are you?’ And I said right, fine, come with me’," King said.
Although this was three months ago, Tavite said she still experiences headaches, migraines, drowsiness and struggles to concentrate for long periods.
She didn't play for the rest of the season and is now questioning whether she wants to keep playing the sport she loves.
Bernie Tavite, who’s the team’s former manager, said it has been unsettling seeing her daughter still weathering the effects of the injuries.
“She says, I’m feeling this way and I don’t know why.”
Her daughter has days which are a mental battle and she’ll withdraw, Bernie Tavite said.
“It’s a serious, serious brain injury. We’ve taken it very seriously with our team.”
New Zealand Rugby concussion guidelines outline players must be benched for 21 days, but can return after that with medical clearance.
King, who works as a clinical nurse specialist at Hutt Hospital’s emergency department, has just published research that suggests those guidelines don’t account for women’s average recovery time.
His PhD research followed 40 Wellington women’s club rugby players through a season and found they took an average of 28.9 days before they were fit to play again. He tested their abilities through an international standard known as the King-Devick test, which can be done on the sideline and asks players to rapidly read numbers scattered across a screen.
“The international consensus on concussion says 80 per cent will resolve in seven to 10 days. But here I’m finding this cohort of players – at 10 days they're at their worst. Everything is set on what’s been tested before and it’s always been tested on males.”
A common misconception is that concussion requires a head knock, but that’s not always the case, King said. This means things like a low tackle, a shoulder hitting the ground, even an upright heavy landing can cause concussion, he said.
“If I have a block of jelly inside a case, I can make the case stronger, but hit the case and it’s still going to wobble.”
There’s also a perception the injury is a respectable battle scar and that needs to change, he said.
“It’s not a badge of honour. It’s a silent epidemic and people need to be more aware of it.”
The two days immediately following the injury is crucial for starting work with physiotherapists, he said. While rest is important, plonking yourself in front of a screen can be dangerous.
“Don’t go to work for a week, don’t go to school for a week you need to recover. In that week you need cognitive rest –so no TVs, playstation, anything like that - but do your walks – walking around the house, walking around the block, and increase it slowly.”
King has just been named in the top 0.5 per cent of international experts on concussion by medical ranking site Expertscape. His research into women’s concussion has just been published in the international journal, JSM Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation.
Despite his knowledge, King admits to sniffing bath salts during his rugby days to perk himself up after a head knock, but said he’s now committed to changing that mentality among players.
“When I look back at it now, I don’t know why I kept playing. It’s a tough guy mentality and a tough girl mentality.”
Four concussions by 21: Hutt specialist finds women take a month to recover
Read more: https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/health ... to-recover
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greybeard58
- Posts: 2511
- Joined: Sat Aug 21, 2004 11:40 pm
“If I can make it through it you can too.”
“If I can make it through it you can too.”
“If I can make it through it you can too.” Former pro hockey player Tyler Brower battled concussion symptoms for years before returning to hockey and feeling better than ever. He shares his inspirational comeback story in this week's Concussion Hope video.
https://mobile.twitter.com/ConcussionLF ... 8065970176
“If I can make it through it you can too.” Former pro hockey player Tyler Brower battled concussion symptoms for years before returning to hockey and feeling better than ever. He shares his inspirational comeback story in this week's Concussion Hope video.
https://mobile.twitter.com/ConcussionLF ... 8065970176
-
greybeard58
- Posts: 2511
- Joined: Sat Aug 21, 2004 11:40 pm
Differences in state traumatic brain injury data
Differences in state traumatic brain injury data
"Level of rurality might play a role in the incidence of TBI-related deaths in states with higher rates. Residents in rural areas experience a higher incidence of TBI and might face barriers to accessing emergency medical care (including Level I trauma centers)"
Differences in State Traumatic Brain Injury–Related Deaths, by Principal Mechanism of Injury, Intent, and Percentage of Population Living in Rural Areas — United States, 2016–2018
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7041a3.htm
Minnesota: 26.73% percentage of population living in rural area
https://stacks.cdc.gov/view/cdc/110372
"Level of rurality might play a role in the incidence of TBI-related deaths in states with higher rates. Residents in rural areas experience a higher incidence of TBI and might face barriers to accessing emergency medical care (including Level I trauma centers)"
Differences in State Traumatic Brain Injury–Related Deaths, by Principal Mechanism of Injury, Intent, and Percentage of Population Living in Rural Areas — United States, 2016–2018
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7041a3.htm
Minnesota: 26.73% percentage of population living in rural area
https://stacks.cdc.gov/view/cdc/110372