Sports-Related Concussions & Subconcussive Injuries

The emerging model of sport concussion assessment now involves the use of brief screening tools to evaluate post-concussion signs and symptoms on the sideline immediately after a concussion and neuropsychological testing to track recovery further out from the time of injury. One of the tools of value for sideline evaluation is called the Standardized Assessment of Concussion.

Teenage soccer players who wear protective headgear suffer nearly half as many concussions as those who play without soccer headgear, according to a 2008 study conducted by Canadian researchers.

Second Impact Syndrome (SIS) occurs when an athlete who sustains a head injury - often a concussion or worse injury, such as a cerebral contusion (bruised brain) - sustains a second head injury before symptoms associated with the first have cleared. Typically, the athlete suffers post-concussion signs and symptoms after the first head injury, such as headache, visual, motor or sensory changes or mental difficulty, especially with the thought and memory process. Before these symptoms have cleared, which may take minutes, hours, days or weeks, the athlete returns to competition and receives a second blow to the head.

The question of when it is safe for your child to return to the playing field after suffering a concussion is largely a matter of clinical judgment on an individualized basis, but some hard and fast rules do apply.

An athlete can experience two types of amnesia after a concussion: anterograde (reduced ability to form new memories) and/or retrograde (partial or total loss of the ability to recall events before injury). Whether anterograde amnesia is an indicator of more serious injury and slower recovery remains unclear.

Game officials are often in the best position to detect the subtle signs of concussions in athletes during a game but are not often given the power to order a sideline evaluation and assessment of concussion and few have received concussion education.

Parents should have the right to expect, if their child is playing contact or collision sports, that he or she undergo pre-season baseline and post-injury neuropsychological testing as the current consensus statement on concussions recommends for athletes in such sport, regardless of age or competitive level.

MomsTEAM has been advocating for years that every U.S. high school should have an athletic trainer on staff, given their key role in assessing and treating sports injuries, including concussions, and in making return to play decisions. While only 60-65% of schools have an AT, recent statistics suggest that fully 85-90% of high school athletes are now working with ATs on a daily basis.

Because coaches have the strongest influence on a student-athlete's decision to report a concussion, more concussion education of coaches, including the need to report concussions, however, minor, and the creation of a safe reporting environment are critical, experts say, to combating chronic underreporting of concussion.

Because one of the keys to keeping athletes safe when it comes to concussion is education, a concussion education and safety meeting should be held for parents and athletes should be held before every season. Ideally, the meeting should include presentations by medical doctors, former athletes, and parents of concussed current or former athletes.