Adam's Blogroll: click through to the author's blog
Concussion, traumatic brain injury, and life’s hard knocks Search “concussion” in the media and you’ll come away thinking hard knocks to the head are chiefly a problem for kids and football players (or kid football players.) Last fall the blog … Continue reading
The post Concussion, TBI, human evolution, Neanderthal DNA, blogging news appeared first on PLOS Blogs Network.
Posted by in 538, brain, Concussion, dna, FiveThirtyEight, HealthNewsReview, Human Evolution, medical journalism, medical writing, mild traumatic brain injury, MTBI, Nate Silver, Neandertal, Neanderthal, paleontology, science blogging, Science Journalism, Science Writing, TBI, traumatic brain injury
Last week the NFL announced their Head Health Initiative, a 4 year $60 million dollar collaboration to improve diagnosis and recovery from potential head injuries. $40 million dollars will go towards developing imaging technology to better detect trauma in head injuries and $20 million will be devoted to the study of concussions including understanding, diagnosing, and treating them.
This dedication of resources comes on the heels of more than 3,800 former and current NFL players filing lawsuits against the NFL over head injuries.Fellow blogger Josh, has written about this topic before, and has several recommendations for how the NFL could improve care of it’s athletes. One of the most high profile is that of the family of Junior Seau. Seau died last year of a self-inflicted gunshot wound and was diagnosed with chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) posthumously. Lawyers argue that a 20 year career of hard hits and repeated concussions lead to progressive degeneration of Seau’s brain contributing to his depression.
There is some evidence that repeated hard hits in many sports can lead to serious problems. The New York Times wrote a three part article on the life and demise of Derek Boogaard, a well-known hockey enforcer known for his proclivity for fighting. In addition to athletes, many military personnel are afflicted with CTE after exposure to explosions. While it seems that strong impacts can cause detrimental long term symptoms, increased rates of mental illness can also be found in baseball players who experience very little impact (also previously addressed by fellow blogger Josh). So while we can guess that physical harm can contribute to eventual mental illness the links are far from clear cut.
So far, it has been very difficult to track these brain injuries because they don’t show up on CT scans or MRIs which are commonly performed on patients with a potential head injury. The only way to track these injuries is by observing other symptoms that might occur after this type of trauma and this is really difficult to do consistently. These new tools could help us to differentiate why some professional athletes in lower impact sports are also experiencing an increase in long term mental illness and suicide.
The NFL is making a good faith effort to address this devastating potential side effect of playing a rough and tumble game. Hopefully this infusion of funding will lead to information that will be useful for not just football players but all people exposed to a potential head injury and even those who haven’t.
Posted by in Concussion, CTE, Follies of the Human Condition, head injury, NFL
Last week the NFL announced their Head Health Initiative, a 4 year $60 million dollar collaboration to improve diagnosis and recovery from potential head injuries. $40 million dollars will go towards developing imaging technology to better detect trauma in head injuries and $20 million will be devoted to the study of concussions including understanding, diagnosing, and treating them.
This dedication of resources comes on the heels of more than 3,800 former and current NFL players filing lawsuits against the NFL over head injuries.Fellow blogger Josh, has written about this topic before, and has several recommendations for how the NFL could improve care of it’s athletes. One of the most high profile is that of the family of Junior Seau. Seau died last year of a self-inflicted gunshot wound and was diagnosed with chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) posthumously. Lawyers argue that a 20 year career of hard hits and repeated concussions lead to progressive degeneration of Seau’s brain contributing to his depression.
There is some evidence that repeated hard hits in many sports can lead to serious problems. The New York Times wrote a three part article on the life and demise of Derek Boogaard, a well-known hockey enforcer known for his proclivity for fighting. In addition to athletes, many military personnel are afflicted with CTE after exposure to explosions. While it seems that strong impacts can cause detrimental long term symptoms, increased rates of mental illness can also be found in baseball players who experience very little impact (also previously addressed by fellow blogger Josh). So while we can guess that physical harm can contribute to eventual mental illness the links are far from clear cut.
So far, it has been very difficult to track these brain injuries because they don’t show up on CT scans or MRIs which are commonly performed on patients with a potential head injury. The only way to track these injuries is by observing other symptoms that might occur after this type of trauma and this is really difficult to do consistently. These new tools could help us to differentiate why some professional athletes in lower impact sports are also experiencing an increase in long term mental illness and suicide.
The NFL is making a good faith effort to address this devastating potential side effect of playing a rough and tumble game. Hopefully this infusion of funding will lead to information that will be useful for not just football players but all people exposed to a potential head injury and even those who haven’t.
Posted by in Concussion, CTE, diagnostic imaging, Follies of the Human Condition, head injury, NFL
I am an unapologetic fan of violent, contact sports. I have wonderful memories of being a participant in violent, contact sports. On the rugby teams I played for, I was usually the guy tasked with bringing both the violence and the contact to the other team. These sports are fun to play. They are fun to watch. But, predictably, that violence takes a toll on the human body.
The recent murder of Kasandra Perkins and subsequent suicide of her killer, NFL player Jovan Belcher has focused new attention on the risk of violent behavior/suicide in these athletes. So much so that Major League Baseball is reportedly working on a program to help identify troubled athletes and get them help before things go really wrong. This sounds like a good thing (provided it is executed well), but wait…did you say MLB? As in baseball?
Yes, baseball. I was surprised to learn from Chris Mortensen’s report, that there also appears to be an unusually large number of suicides among current and former professional baseball players. I cannot find all the numbers one would need to confirm that the NFL and MLB suicide rates are truly exceptional, but both sports seem concerned.
I am not an entirely disinterested party. While I never received a concussion playing football, I have had two concussions while playing rugby. Once in college due to an illegal hit and once in graduate school due to an awkward tackle that was my own fault (don’t head butt a guy’s knee, kids). I was lucky that I had no post-concussion issues and was not pressured to play again until I was ready. I look forward to getting old having to worry about the wear and tear on other pieces of my body than my brain.
It is certainly true that a professional football career does significant, long term, physical damage to players. Watch any Football Hall of Fame induction. It is hard to argue that those guys aged well. It is, however, hard to think of any more serious result from playing football than long term effects of brain damage.
I am skeptical that most of us would care about the physical and mental abilities of former NFL players declining at an accelerated rate without the headline grabbing suicides*. We can hide the old and infirm in homes or behind nursemaids. You cannot hide Junior Seau shooting himself in the chest. Connecting the dots between a faster/more physical modern football, hits to the head, and suicides makes a neat, simple narrative.
The suicides of MLB players suggests that the suicides of NFL players may be about more than just hits to the head. On its face, suicides by baseball players is not consistent with the simple narrative of head injuries leading to behavioral changes leading to suicide or violence.
I’m not putting my experience on the same scale as these professional athletes, but I have had to cope with the weird emotional ups and downs of intense, physical competition. Our society does not prepare us well for the transition from the intensity of hitting another person as hard as you can to the tedium of picking up the dry cleaning.
This is not to minimize the problem, though it does complicate it. If what these athletes need is help coping with their unusual, competitive lifestyle (intense competition, training, and adulation, punctuated by boredom) or transitioning to a “normal” life, then all the fines for hit to the head and CT scans in the world won’t solve the problem. My guess is that they need all of the above.
*I’m also skeptical that we would have heard much about these in years before the 24/7 focus on the sporting world provided by networks like ESPN.
