Medical School researchers are partnering with faculty in the Education School to use cutting-edge technology to study the impact of head injuries and concussions in 130 male and female high school and college athletes.
Though most studies of concussions in athletes follow just male football players, for example, this study will follow athletes from football, men’s and women’s lacrosse, and men’s and women’s soccer at the University and St. Anne’s-Belfield School.
“The study is driven by a desire to understand what happens when the brain is impacted by multiple forces during athletic play, with the intent of making sports safer,” said Neurology Prof. Howard Goodkin, one of the lead researchers on the study.
Athletes will receive a functional MRI scan to establish a baseline physiology of the brain. From there, each athlete will wear a sensor behind his or her ear that records not only concussions, but any impact to the head.
“We are looking for changes in the brain in athletes that haven’t necessarily been diagnosed with a concussion,” Goodkin said. “We are hoping to learn if it is one big impact or multiple impacts that lead to physiological changes of the brain.”
Traditionally, such studies have only been conducted with male athletes in helmeted sports where sensors would be placed on the helmet. But according to a 2011 article in the American Journal of Sports Medicine, female soccer players had the highest rates of concussions across all sports.
Part of the reason for this, Goodkin said, is that females athletes do fewer neck strengthening exercises which would help prevent head injuries. With the use of the new behind-the-ear sensors produced by X2 Biosystems, this University study will be able to draw more sweeping conclusions about female athletes and athletes from sports where helmets are not required.
Early symptoms of concussions include loss of consciousness, change in memory, headache, nausea, fatigue, problems with attention and changes in mood. In the long-term, concussions can cause chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a progressive brain degeneration often seen in athletes who have experienced multiple head traumas.
Athletes suffering from head traumas and concussions frequently make headlines, most recently in a Washington Post article on Nov. 2 that featured United States National Soccer team goalkeeper Briana Scurry, who was forced to retire from soccer after a severe head injury during a game left her depressed, often unable to get out of bed and unrecognizable to her former teammates.
But the understanding of how sports-related concussions can lead to debilitating medical outcomes like Scurry’s is still limited, creating the need for research such as that done by Goodkin, Asst. Neuroradiology Prof. Jason Druzgal, Assoc. Psychiatry Prof. Donna Broshek and Assoc. Education Prof. Susan Saliba.
This study will also help differentiate between concussions in adults and in adolescents, paving the way for a better understanding of how athletes’ brains are impacted by their sports.
“We know that adolescents brains are likely different, they are still developing, and will respond differently to the same number of hits,” Goodkin said. “The long term goal with imaging is to see physiologic changes in the brain that indicate concussion or changes that indicate it has resolved and you are ready to go back to the playing field.”
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