Top-of-head concussions are more severe

A study claims that concussions on the top of a person's head have a higher level of severity than other concussions.

As we head into the start of the new school year, many young people will begin signing up for the football team. Though team sports are a great way for kids to boost their self-esteem and increase physical activity, there are certain risks involved with contact sports, including concussions. Now, a recent study from the American Academy of Pediatrics investigates how the location of impact could affect concussion severity.

Prior to this study, published in the journal Pediatrics, very little research had focused on how location of impact on the head could yield differentconcussion outcomes.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), a concussion is a traumatic brain injury(TBI) that is the result of a bump, blow or jolt to the head that can change how the brain normally works.

To investigate further, researchers used data from the National High School Sports-Related Injury Surveillance Study to calculate rates and circumstances of concussions that occurred during football as a result of player-to-player collisions.

The team observed that most concussions of this type (44.7%) occurred on the front of the head, while 22.3% occurred on the side of the head. Based on where the impact occurred, the number and type of symptoms, symptom resolution time, and length of time before returning to play did not vary significantly.

But the data revealed that more football players whose concussions resulted from top-of-head impacts lost consciousness than those whose impacts were located elsewhere on the head.

In detail, 8% of players with top-of-head concussions experienced loss of consciousness, compared with only 3.5% of those with impacts on other areas.

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Concussions Take a Terrible Toll on America's Young Athletes

Across the country, people have awakened to the sometimes irreversible damage of concussions, especially in high-impact professional sports. With much of the attention focused on the National Football and National Hockey leagues, Village Voice Media conducted a nationwide investigation into the consequences of concussion on youth athletes. We found the following:

• The effect of a concussion on kids can be much more devastating than on adults. Doctors say that until a person reaches his early to mid 20s, his brain is not fully developed and can't take the same level of trauma as an adult brain can.

• Postmortem analysis, the only sure way to measure the effects of concussions, shows that repeated blows to the head may be linked with Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, ALS and a number of other fatal diseases.

• An athlete who doesn't exhibit headaches, dizziness, vomiting, temporary amnesia or other outward signs of concussions still can experience changes in brain activity similar to those in a player who has been clinically diagnosed with a concussion.

• The ImPACT test, widely regarded as the go-to neurological exam to measure concussive blows, doesn't always accurately gauge a player's readiness to return to action. And you can cheat on it.

• Thus far in 2011, 20 state governments and the District of Columbia have signed concussion legislation that prohibits an athlete from returning to play until cleared by a licensed physician. To date, 28 states have concussion laws in place. (California, however, does not.)

As attorneys debate how the new concussion laws will play out, parents are struggling with a growing awareness that if they push their children to be standouts in athletics — sometimes the key to a better future — the cost might be irreversible damage.

Read more at: http://www.laweekly.com/2011-08-18/news/concussions-take-a-terrible-toll-on-america-s-young-athletes/