Attention: Players, Parents, Coaches
Frequently asked questions on head injuries, heatstroke and how to protect young players' health and safety
Head Injuries
How big a problem are high school football head injuries?
At least 60,000 concussions occur every year on high school football fields. But now there's a new piece of the story: Researchers' neurological tests are showing that young players who never reported symptoms of a concussion, but had taken sub-concussive hits, have suffered significant damage to their memories. As the season wore on, these players performed increasingly worse on cognitive tests.
What happens to the brain in a concussion?
A concussion is a blow to the head that results in the brain crashing into the skull. Dr. Ann McKee, a neuropathologist at Boston University describes the impact of a concussion:
"The brain isn't hard. It's this firm gelatinous tissue. It elongates and stretches and deforms ... so all the individual nerve cells in there are actually being stretched and undergoing shearing forces, and they're being damaged just by the elongation of the brain or the torsion on the brain. What happens after a concussion is that a nerve cell has all sorts of changes in its covering. All sorts of ions flow into the nerve cell that are damaging to it. There are changes in the blood flow to regions."
She warns that the damage inside the nerve cell doesn't repair immediately; at the very least it can take days, if not weeks or months, for the brain to return to its resting normal state. Repetitive brain trauma makes recovery even more difficult. A second concussion before the first has fully healed, known as second impact syndrome, can lead to permanent brain damage and is often a fatal condition.
High school football has never had a higher profile ...
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