By Lisa Rapaport Researchers examined data on high school soccer players from 2005 to 2014 and found non-concussion injury rates declined for boys and were little changed for girls. But concussions increased in both male and female players. The significant rise in concussion rates "could be mainly due to a better recognition of concussion by medical and coaching staff," study leader Dr. Morteza Khodaee, a sports medicine researcher at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, said in an email. The research team looked at injuries per minute of athletic exposure (AE), which includes both practices and competitions, for U.S. high school athletes. Overall, there were 6,154 injuries during 2.98 million athletic exposures, for an injury rate of 2.06 per 1,000 AEs, the study found. That included about 1.8 million soccer injuries among girls and 1.5 million among boys. Girls were 27 percent more likely to sustain soccer injuries than boys, the authors reported online December 28 in the British Journal of Sports Medicine. Injuries were 42 percent more common in competitions than during practice. "The majority of injuries during competitions occurred during the second half indicating a potential accumulated effect of fatigue," the authors reported. "It is well known that the risk of injury is higher in competition compared with practice," Khodaee said. "This is most likely due to more intense, full contact and potentially riskier play that occurs in competition." Still, while injury rates were significantly higher in competition, more than one third of all injuries occurred in practice. © 2017 Scientific American

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 19: Language and Lateralization
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 15: Language and Lateralization
Link ID: 23117 - Posted: 01.18.2017

By SAM BORDEN, MIKA GRÖNDAHL and JOE WARD When player No. 81 took this blow to his head several years ago, it was just one of many concussions that have occurred throughout college football and the N.F.L. But what made this one different was that this player was wearing a mouth guard with motion sensors. The information from those sensors has given researchers a more detailed and precise window into what was happening within the player’s brain in the milliseconds after the hit. Here is what happened to his brain. One common belief has been that just after a person’s head (or helmet) makes contact with something – an airbag, a wall, another person – the brain within bounces around in the skull like an egg yolk in a shell, leaving bruises on the brain’s outer surface, or gray matter. Now, though, many scientists and medical experts believe that this understanding is incomplete. Yes, there is some movement in the skull, but the real damage from concussions, they say, actually occurs deeper in the brain – in the so-called white matter – as a result of fibers pulling and twisting after impact. To stick with the food analogy, think Jell-O, not an egg. You know what happens when you take a plate of Jell-O and give it a hard shake? The stretches and contortions approximate what is happening to all the wiring throughout the brain. To better track the brain’s reaction to these hits, scientists in several labs have been working on a variety of mechanisms, some of which, like the one used during the impact shown above, are moving away from ones connected directly to a football helmet because the helmet can move independently of the skull. “The forces you’re measuring with those are not really exactly what the brain is seeing,” said Robert Cantu, clinical professor of neurosurgery at the Boston University School of Medicine. The mouth guard that was used was developed by the bioengineer David Camarillo and his team at the Cam Lab at Stanford. Camarillo and others have speculated that the most damaging blows are those that cause the head to snap quickly from ear to ear, like the one shown above, or those that cause a violent rotation or twisting of the head through a glancing blow. “The brain’s wiring, essentially, is all running from left to right, not front to back,” Camarillo said, referring to the primary wiring that connects the brain’s hemispheres. “So the direction you are struck can have a very different effect within the brain. In football, the presence of the face mask can make that sort of twisting even more extreme.” © 2017 The New York Times Company

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 19: Language and Lateralization; Chapter 2: Functional Neuroanatomy: The Cells and Structure of the Nervous System
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 15: Language and Lateralization; Chapter 1: Cells and Structures: The Anatomy of the Nervous System
Link ID: 23085 - Posted: 01.11.2017

By Meredith Wadman In athletes who suffered a concussion, a protein in their blood may be able to predict when they can return to action. A new study finds that those who took longer to return to play had higher levels of a protein known as tau in their blood in the 6 hours following the trauma than players who were cleared to return to the field sooner. Tau blood testing isn’t ready for prime time, but experts say that if it pans out it would become an invaluable tool for coaches and physicians alike. Trainers, sports physicians, and neurologists deal with some 3.8 million sports-related concussions in the United States each year. But they still lack an objective medical test to establish whether someone has sustained the injury, and at what point they have recovered enough from one to resume playing. Instead, they are forced to rely on often-nebulous physical signs, and on players’ self-reporting of symptoms. And it’s known that players, keen to get back on the field, often minimize these. “We don’t want a biomarker that just says somebody had a concussion,” says study leader Jessica Gill, a neuroscientist at the National Institute of Nursing Research in Bethesda, Maryland. “We want a biomarker that says who needs to be out of play to recover.” Gill, with concussion physician Jeffrey Bazarian of the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry in New York, and colleagues took preseason blood samples from more than 600 male and female University of Rochester athletes who participate in contact sports: football, basketball, hockey, and lacrosse. In it, they measured levels of tau, a protein linked to traumatic brain injury and Alzheimer’s disease, which has been found to be elevated in the blood of Olympic boxers and concussed ice hockey players. © 2017 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 19: Language and Lateralization; Chapter 7: Life-Span Development of the Brain and Behavior
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 15: Language and Lateralization; Chapter 4: Development of the Brain
Link ID: 23068 - Posted: 01.07.2017

Lisa Vincenz-Donnelly A test that records the way the brain processes sound might provide a simple and reliable measure of concussion, a small study suggests. If the method works, it could help scientists work out how best to treat the poorly understood brain injury. In a paper published on 22 December in Scientific Reports1, neuroscientist Nina Kraus of Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, and other researchers say that they have found that a particular signal in neural activity, recorded with electrodes placed on the head as children listen to 'da' sounds from a speech synthesizer, can objectively demarcate concussed children from a healthy control group. The research was done on just 40 people — a tiny group — and will have to be repeated in larger samples. But other researchers are still excited by the report, because concussion is hard to diagnose, particularly in children. The study “may for the first time offer a simple and objective biomarker to measure the severity of brain injuries”, says Thomas Wisniewski, a neurologist at New York University’s Langone Medical Center. There is intense interest in finding a clear-cut biological signature for concussion, he says. “We have been crying out for a reliable method." Millions of people enter hospitals every year with blows to the head, and some of have concussion, a minor brain injury that can betoken more serious damage. To diagnose it, physicians rely on subjective complaints of dizziness, coordination tests and sometimes more involved procedures, such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) or computed tomography (CT) scans. But there’s no single objective way to detect concussion and measure its severity — and no simple test that can be administered regularly to determine when someone has recovered, a particularly important issue for athletes keen to be allowed back on the field. © 2016 Macmillan Publishers Limited

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 19: Language and Lateralization; Chapter 9: Hearing, Balance, Taste, and Smell
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 15: Language and Lateralization; Chapter 6: Hearing, Balance, Taste, and Smell
Link ID: 23014 - Posted: 12.23.2016

Men and women who suffered traumatic brain injuries had more than twice the risk of winding up in a federal prison in Canada as their uninjured peers, a new study shows. That doesn't surprise Dr. Geoffrey Manley, a neurosurgeon who runs a trauma centre. He knows all too well the long-term struggles of survivors of traumatic brain injuries. "Because there's no system of care for these individuals, they fall into the cracks and get themselves in trouble. And we really as a society are not doing a good job of taking care of people with traumatic brain injuries," Manley, who was not involved in the study, said in a phone interview. For 13 years, researchers followed more than 1.4 million people who were eligible for health care in Ontario and were between the ages of 18 and 28 in 1997. As reported in CMAJ Open, the open-access journal of the Canadian Medical Association, the research team linked subjects' health records to correctional records, adjusted for a variety of factors like age and substance abuse, and found that men with traumatic brain injuries were 2.5 times more likely to serve time in a Canadian federal prison than men without head injuries. Female prisoners were even more likely to have survived traumatic brain injuries. For women with these injuries, the risk of winding up in a Canadian federal prison was 2.76 times higher than it was for uninjured women, although the authors caution that the pool of incarcerated females was small, accounting for only 210 of the more than 700,000 women studied. ©2016 CBC/Radio-Canada.

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 19: Language and Lateralization; Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 15: Language and Lateralization; Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Link ID: 22970 - Posted: 12.09.2016

By Usha Lee McFarling, There’s something wrong with the brain banks created to study the dangers of repeated trauma to the head: Almost all the brains donated so far belonged to men. It’s just one example of how the study of brain trauma in women lags behind—even though women get concussions at higher rates than men in many sports and may suffer more severe and persistent symptoms. “If concussion is the invisible injury, then females are the invisible population within that injury,” said Katherine Snedaker, a licensed clinical social worker from Norwalk, Conn., who founded the nonprofit PINK Concussions in 2013 to focus attention on the issue. Evidence is building that the response to traumatic injury is different enough in females that they might benefit from gender-specific treatment, as they do with cardiac disease. But the data to create such guidelines simply aren’t there. “It’s an incredible gap in our knowledge,” said Angela Colantonio, director of the Rehabilitation Science Institute at the University of Toronto. “It’s just not acceptable.” When Colantonio examined 200 studies on prognosis after mild traumatic brain injury, she found only 7 percent separated out women. And if female athletes are overlooked, other groups vulnerable to concussion—aging women, women in prison, and domestic abuse survivors—have been nearly entirely ignored. © 2016 Scientific American

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 19: Language and Lateralization; Chapter 12: Sex: Evolutionary, Hormonal, and Neural Bases
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 15: Language and Lateralization; Chapter 8: Hormones and Sex
Link ID: 22897 - Posted: 11.22.2016

By GRETCHEN REYNOLDS A single concussion experienced by a child or teenager may have lasting repercussions on mental health and intellectual and physical functioning throughout adulthood, and multiple head injuries increase the risks of later problems, according to one of the largest, most elaborate studies to date of the impacts of head trauma on the young. You cannot be an athlete, parent of an athlete, sports fan or reader of this newspaper and not be aware that concussions appear to be both more common — and more dangerous — than most of us once thought. According to a report released last week by the health insurer Blue Cross Blue Shield, based on data from medical claims nationwide, the incidence of diagnosed concussions among people under the age of 20 climbed 71 percent between 2010 and 2015. The rates rose most steeply among girls, with the incidence soaring by 119 percent during that time, although almost twice as many concussions over all were diagnosed in boys. The report acknowledges that the startling increase may partly reflect a growing awareness of the injury among parents, sports officials and physicians, which has led to more diagnoses. But the sheer numbers also suggest that more young people, particularly young athletes, are experiencing head injuries than in the past. Similar increases have been noted among young people in other nations. But the consequences, if any, for their health during adulthood have largely remained unknown. So for the new study, which was funded primarily by the Wellcome Trust and published in August in PLOS Medicine, scientists from Oxford University, Indiana University, the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm and other universities turned to an extensive trove of data about the health of people in Sweden. © 2016 The New York Times Company

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 19: Language and Lateralization; Chapter 7: Life-Span Development of the Brain and Behavior
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 15: Language and Lateralization; Chapter 4: Development of the Brain
Link ID: 22728 - Posted: 10.05.2016

By Abdul-Kareem Ahmed In the world of recreational and professional sports, many athletes—particularly in contact sports—suffer concussions. These mild traumatic brain injuries cause headaches, memory problems and confusion, but usually resolve on their own with rest. Some players, however, especially after repeated concussions, continue to experience symptoms for many months—a phenomenon termed post-concussion syndrome. A few of these players will eventually develop chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a progressive neurodegenerative disease that causes dementia symptoms similar to Alzheimer’s disease. CTE can lead to personality changes, movement problems and, sometimes, mortality. CTE is diagnosed after death because it requires postmortem examination of a player’s brain. Post-concussion syndrome, in contrast, is diagnosed based on patient symptoms. To date, doctors do not have any objective tests to determine syndrome severity or relate it to the risk of developing CTE. Now, a group of researchers from Sweden and the U.K. say they have developed such a test, reporting their findings last week in JAMA Neurology. The test measures biomarkers in the cerebrospinal fluid—the colorless liquid that supports and suspends the brain and spinal cord—that appear to provide a measure of concussion severity and CTE risk. The researchers collected cerebrospinal fluid via spinal taps from 16 professional Swedish ice hockey players and a similar number of healthy individuals. The hockey players had all experienced post-concussion syndrome, causing nine of them to retire from the game. © 2016 Scientific American,

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 19: Language and Lateralization; Chapter 7: Life-Span Development of the Brain and Behavior
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 15: Language and Lateralization; Chapter 4: Development of the Brain
Link ID: 22700 - Posted: 09.27.2016

By KEN BELSON One of the frustrations of researchers who study chronic traumatic encephalopathy, the degenerative brain disease linked to repeated head hits, is that it can be detected only in autopsies, and not in the living. Researchers, though, have been trying to solve this problem in two primary ways: by identifying biomarkers linked to the disease that show up on imaging tests in certain locations in the brain, and by trying to locate in the blood the protein that is the hallmark of the disease. On Monday, two groups of researchers said they had made what they considered small steps in developing both methods. The announcements are small parts of much larger studies that will take years to bear fruit, if they ever do. Both methods have been questioned by detractors, some of whom say the hype is getting ahead of the science. Scientists, these critics note, have spent decades trying to find ways to accurately diagnose Alzheimer’s disease, which has some of the same characteristics as C.T.E. Still, at a medical conference in Boston on Monday, Robert Stern, a professor of neurology at Boston University, said technology developed by the company Quanterix (paid for in part with a grant from the N.F.L.) had identified elevated levels of tau proteins in blood samples of 96 former football players between 40 and 69 years old, compared with only 25 people of the same age in a control group. The results, which are part of a seven-year study and are under review for publication, are preliminary because they identify only the total amount of tau in the blood, not the amount of the specific tau linked to C.T.E. Additional tests are being done in Sweden to determine the amount of the C.T.E.-related tau in the blood samples, Stern said. Even so, Stern said, the blood samples from the 96 former players suggest that absorbing repeated head hits earlier in life can lead to higher concentrations of tau in the blood later. © 2016 The New York Times Company

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 19: Language and Lateralization; Chapter 7: Life-Span Development of the Brain and Behavior
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 15: Language and Lateralization; Chapter 4: Development of the Brain
Link ID: 22699 - Posted: 09.27.2016

Jon Hamilton There's growing evidence that a physical injury to the brain can make people susceptible to post-traumatic stress disorder. Studies of troops deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan have found that service members who suffer a concussion or mild traumatic brain injury are far more likely to develop PTSD, a condition that can cause flashbacks, nightmares and severe anxiety for years after a traumatic event. And research on both people and animals suggest the reason is that a brain injury can disrupt circuits that normally dampen the response to a frightening event. The result is like "driving a car and the brake's not fully functioning," says Minxiong Huang, a biomedical physicist at the University of California, San Diego. Scientists have suspected a link between traumatic brain injury (TBI) and PTSD for many years. But the evidence was murky until researchers began studying troops returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. What they found was a lot of service members like Charles Mayer, an Army sniper from San Diego who developed PTSD after finishing a deployment in Iraq. In 2010, Mayer was on patrol in an Army Humvee near Baghdad when a roadside bomb went off. "I was unconscious for several minutes," he says. So he found out what happened from the people who dragged him out. The blast fractured Mayer's spine. It also affected his memory and thinking. That became painfully clear when Mayer got out of the Army in 2012. © 2016 npr

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 19: Language and Lateralization; Chapter 16: Psychopathology: Biological Basis of Behavior Disorders
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 15: Language and Lateralization; Chapter 12: Psychopathology: The Biology of Behavioral Disorders
Link ID: 22695 - Posted: 09.26.2016

By Meredith Wadman Last year, in a move to counter charges that it has neglected the health and safety of its players, the National Football League (NFL) tapped Elizabeth “Betsy” Nabel as its first chief health and medical adviser, a paid position to which she told The Boston Globe she devotes about 1 day a month, plus some nights and weekends. (She and NFL have not disclosed her salary.) And last week, Nabel answered Science’s questions on the heels of NFL’s 14 September announcement that it will devote $40 million in new funding to medical research, primarily neuroscience relevant to repetitive head injuries—with grant applications judged by an NFL-convened panel of scientists, rather than by National Institutes of Health (NIH) study sections. Nabel is well known to many medical scientists as the cardiologist who directed the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute at NIH, then left that job in 2009 to become president of a prestigious Harvard University–affiliated teaching hospital: Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. Nabel’s new role with NFL came under media scrutiny in May, when a report by Democrats on the House of Representatives Energy and Commerce Committee found that NFL inappropriately tried to influence the way its “unrestricted” donation to NIH was spent. It revealed, for example, that last year Nabel contacted NIH’s neurology institute director Walter Koroshetz to question the objectivity of an NIH study section and of a principal investigator whose team the peer reviewers had just awarded a $16 million grant. Robert Stern and his group at Boston University, with others, were proposing to image the brains and chart the symptoms of scores of college and professional football players across time. NFL suggested that the scientists, who have led in establishing the link between repetitive head injury and the neurodegenerative brain disease chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), were not objective; Nabel described them in one email as “a more marginal group” whose influence it would be well to “dilute.” The scientists were to have been paid from $30 million that NFL donated to NIH in 2012. After the league objected to its $16 million going to fund the Boston University–led team—it did offer to fund $2 million of the amount—NIH’s neurology institute ended up wholly funding the 7-year grant with its own money. © 2016 American Association for the Advancement of Scienc

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 19: Language and Lateralization
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 15: Language and Lateralization
Link ID: 22669 - Posted: 09.20.2016

By RACHEL RABKIN PEACHMAN New research shows that athletes who leave the game immediately after a concussion recover twice as fast as athletes who keep playing. Credit Fabrizio Costantini for The New York Times High school athletes who kept playing in the minutes after a concussion took nearly twice as long to recover as those who left the game immediately after the head trauma, a new study shows. The finding, published in the journal Pediatrics, is believed to be the first to focus on one of the most difficult social challenges of treating concussions: a pervasive sports culture that encourages young athletes to keep playing through pain. Medical guidelines call for benching the athlete immediately after the head injury to prevent long-term complications and the potentially devastating consequences of a second hit. “Kids are often reluctant to acknowledge a concussion,” said Dawon Dicks, a youth football coach with CoachUp in Andover, Mass. “The kid may want a scholarship and want to go to college, or it could be that ‘Dad or Coach wants me to play.’ That’s when they’re going to start to be a little dishonest in what they’re truly feeling.” The latest study tracked the neurological symptoms of 69 athletes who visited the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center Sports Medicine Concussion Program after suffering head trauma during a contact sport. The athletes, who ranged from 12 to 19 years old, came from football, soccer, ice hockey, volleyball, field hockey, basketball, wrestling and rugby. The sample included 35 athletes who were removed from games right after getting a concussion and compared their symptoms and recovery to 34 athletes who kept playing in the game or match after taking a hit. The study found that players who stayed in the game after head trauma took an average of 44 days to recover. By comparison, athletes who left a game immediately after signs of concussion took only an average of 22 days to recover. © 2016 The New York Times Company

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 19: Language and Lateralization
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 15: Language and Lateralization
Link ID: 22614 - Posted: 08.30.2016

Nicola Davis Children who suffer a traumatic brain injury, including mild concussion from a blow to the head, are less likely to do well at school and are at increased risk of early death, researchers have revealed. As adults they are also more likely to receive a disability pension, have failed to gain secondary school qualifications and nearly twice as likely to have been hospitalised for psychiatric reasons. The team analysed data from more than a million people born between 1973 and 1985, finding that around 9% had been diagnosed with at least one traumatic brain injury before the age of 25. More than 75% of these were mild injuries. The researchers compared the outcomes for these individuals with those of others who had not experienced a head injury, as well as carrying out a second comparison, where possible, with siblings who had not been injured. Once factors such as age and sex were taken into account, the team found that those diagnosed with a traumatic brain injury have an increased risk of experiencing a number of health and social problems. Those who had suffered a traumatic brain injury were 76% more likely to receive a disability pension, 58% more likely to have failed to gain secondary school qualifications and nearly twice as likely to have been hospitalised for psychiatric reasons, compared to those who had sustained no injury. When the researchers looked at patients who had siblings that had not sustained a traumatic brain injury, they found similar - although smaller - effects, suggesting that genetics could also play a role. © 2016 Guardian News and Media Limited

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 19: Language and Lateralization; Chapter 7: Life-Span Development of the Brain and Behavior
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 15: Language and Lateralization; Chapter 4: Development of the Brain
Link ID: 22595 - Posted: 08.24.2016

By Sara Chodosh There has long been debate about a link between serious blows to the head and the development of neurodegenerative diseases later in life. Research has made cases for and against a relationship between traumatic brain injuries and neurological ailments such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and general dementia. Now the question is drawing ever more scrutiny as the alarming extent of these injuries becomes better known—and new research is finally casting some light on this murky and often quietly terrifying topic. A large-scale analysis of three separate studies published this week in JAMA Neurology found no association between unconsciousness-causing traumatic brain injuries (TBI) and Alzheimer’s disease or general dementia—but it did find a strong association between TBI and Parkinson’s disease. “I can’t decide if the positive or negative findings are more surprising,” says one of the study’s investigators, physician and Alzheimer’s researcher Paul Crane at the University of Washington. The positive association his team found between Parkinson’s and TBI was not entirely novel, but Crane says the magnitude of the link was unexpected. The researchers found the risk of Parkinson’s rose threefold for people whose head injuries had caused them to go unconscious for more than an hour. The more contentious finding is the lack of an association between TBI and Alzheimer’s. Prior research has been divided on whether there is a link, but many of the previous studies have been smaller in scale and conducted less-comprehensive analyses. “Although early studies suggested a clear link between TBI and an increased risk for Alzheimer’s disease, this has not been replicated,” explains Frances Corrigan at the University of Adelaide, who studies how TBI influences neurodegeneration. © 2016 Scientific American,

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 19: Language and Lateralization; Chapter 11: Motor Control and Plasticity
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 15: Language and Lateralization; Chapter 5: The Sensorimotor System
Link ID: 22450 - Posted: 07.16.2016

By JOHN BRANCH When the N.F.L. agreed in 2012 to donate tens of millions of dollars to concussion research overseen by the National Institutes of Health, it was widely seen as a positive turning point in football’s long history of playing down the long-term effects of brain injuries on players. At the time, the league said that it would have no influence over how the money was used. But the league and its head, neck and spine committee worked to improperly influence the government research, trying to steer the study toward a doctor with ties to the league, according to a study conducted by a congressional committee and released on Monday. “Our investigation has shown that while the N.F.L. had been publicly proclaiming its role as funder and accelerator of important research, it was privately attempting to influence that research,” the study concluded. “The N.F.L. attempted to use its ‘unrestricted gift’ as leverage to steer funding away from one of its critics.” The N.F.L., in a statement, said it rejected the accusations laid out in the study, which was conducted by Democratic members of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce. “There is no dispute that there were concerns raised about both the nature of the study in question and possible conflicts of interest,” the league said. “These concerns were raised for review and consideration through the appropriate channels.” It is the latest in a long history of instances in which the N.F.L. has been found to mismanage concussion research, dating to the league’s first exploration of the crisis when it used deeply flawed data to produce a series of studies. In this case, some of the characters are the same, including Dr. Elliot Pellman, who led the league’s concussion committee for years before he was discredited for his questionable credentials and his role as a longtime denier of the effects of concussions on players. © 2016 The New York Times Company

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 19: Language and Lateralization
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 15: Language and Lateralization
Link ID: 22241 - Posted: 05.24.2016

By Christie Aschwanden When concussions make the news, it’s usually about football. But head injuries happen in other sports too, and not just to men. During a congressional hearing on concussions in youth sports on Friday, Dawn Comstock, an epidemiologist who studies sports injuries, told a House Energy and Commerce subcommittee that in sports like soccer and basketball in which girls and boys play by the same rules, with the same equipment and the same facilities, “girls have higher concussion rates than boys.” Comstock, a researcher at the Colorado School of Public Health, is the first author of a 2015 study published in JAMA Pediatrics that quantified concussions in high school soccer and found that they were about one and a half times more common in girls than in boys. When U.S. Rep. Diana DeGette, D-Colo., asked whether more data was needed to show that girls have higher concussion rates, Comstock replied, “We already have the data that’s consistently shown this gender difference.” What we don’t have, she said, is a proven explanation for the discrepancy. Some researchers have wondered whether women and girls are simply more likely to report their symptoms than men and boys are. “It’s a sexist way to say that they’re not as tough,” said Katherine Price Snedaker, executive director of Pink Concussions,1 an organization that is seeking answers to how concussions affect women and girls. The group recently held a summit on female concussion and traumatic brain injuries at Georgetown University, and one of the speakers was Shannon Bauman, a sports physician who presented data from 207 athletes — both male and female — who’d been evaluated at her specialty concussion clinic in Barrie, Ontario, between September 2014 and January 2016.

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 19: Language and Lateralization; Chapter 12: Sex: Evolutionary, Hormonal, and Neural Bases
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 15: Language and Lateralization; Chapter 8: Hormones and Sex
Link ID: 22229 - Posted: 05.19.2016

Jon Hamilton People who sustain a concussion or a more severe traumatic brain injury are likely to have sleep problems that continue for at least a year and a half. A study of 31 patients with this sort of brain injury found that 18 months afterward, they were still getting, on average, an hour more sleep each night than similar healthy people were getting. And despite the extra sleep, 67 percent showed signs of excessive daytime sleepiness. Only 19 percent of healthy people had that problem. Surprisingly, most of these concussed patients had no idea that their sleep patterns had changed. "If you ask them, they say they are fine," says Dr. Lukas Imbach, the study's first author and a senior physician at the University Hospital Zurich in Zurich. When Imbach confronts patients with their test results, "they are surprised," he says. The results, published Thursday in the online edition of the journal Neurology, suggest there could be a quiet epidemic of sleep disorders among people with traumatic brain injuries. The injuries are diagnosed in more than 2 million people a year in the United States. Common causes include falls, motor vehicle incidents and assaults. Previous studies have found that about half of all people who sustain sudden trauma to the brain experience sleep problems. But it has been unclear how long those problems persist. "Nobody actually had looked into that in detail," Imbach says. A sleep disorder detected 18 months after an injury will linger for at least two years, and probably much longer, the researchers say. © 2016 npr

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 19: Language and Lateralization; Chapter 14: Biological Rhythms, Sleep, and Dreaming
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 15: Language and Lateralization; Chapter 10: Biological Rhythms and Sleep
Link ID: 22155 - Posted: 04.28.2016

By Frank McGurty More than 40 percent of retired NFL players tested with advanced scanning technology showed signs of traumatic brain injury, a much higher rate than in the general population, according to a new study of the long-term risks of playing American football. The research, presented at an American Academy of Neurology meeting that began in Vancouver on Monday, is one of the first to provide "objective evidence" of traumatic brain injury in a large sample of National Football League veterans while they are living, said Dr. Francis X. Conidi, one of the study's authors. Conidi, a neurologist at the Florida Center for Headache and Sports Neurology and a faculty member at the Florida State University College of Medicine, said traumatic brain injury was often a "precursor" to CTE, a degenerative brain disease. "What we do know is that players with traumatic brain injury have a high incidence of going on to develop neurological degenerative disease later on in life," Conidi told Reuters. CTE, or chronic traumatic encephalopathy, has been found in dozens of the NFL's top players after they died. At present, a CTE diagnosis is only possible after death. The brain tissue of 59 or 62 deceased former NFL players examined by Boston University's CTE Center have tested positive for CTE, according to its website. The disease, which can lead to aggression and dementia, may have led to the suicides of several NFL athletes, including Hall of Famer Junior Seau. In the new study, the largest of its kind, 40 living former players were given sensitive brain scans, known as diffusion tensor imaging (DTI), as well as thinking and memory tests. © 2016 Scientific American,

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 19: Language and Lateralization; Chapter 2: Functional Neuroanatomy: The Cells and Structure of the Nervous System
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 15: Language and Lateralization; Chapter 1: Cells and Structures: The Anatomy of the Nervous System
Link ID: 22102 - Posted: 04.13.2016

By BENEDICT CAREY Some scientists studying the relationship between contact sports and memory or mood problems later in life argue that cumulative exposure to hits that cause a snap of the head — not an athlete’s number of concussions — is the most important risk factor. That possibility is particularly worrisome in football, in which frequent “subconcussive” blows are unavoidable. On Thursday, researchers based at Boston University reported the most rigorous evidence to date that overall exposure to contact in former high school and college football players could predict their likelihood of experiencing problems like depression, apathy or memory loss years later. The finding, appearing in The Journal of Neurotrauma, is not conclusive, the authors wrote. Such mental problems can stem from a variety of factors in any long life. Yet the paper represents researchers’ first attempt to precisely calculate cumulative lifetime exposure to contact in living players, experts said. Previous estimates had relied in part on former players’ memories of concussions, or number of years played. The new paper uses more objective measures, including data from helmet accelerometer studies, and provides a glimpse of where the debate over the risk of contact sports may next play out, the experts said. “They used a much more refined and quantitative approach to estimate exposure than I’ve seen in this area,” said John Meeker, a professor of environmental health sciences at the University of Michigan School of Public Health, who was not a part of the research team. But he added, “Their methods will have to be validated in much larger studies; this is very much a preliminary finding.” The study did not address the risk of chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or C.T.E., a degenerative scarring in the brain tied to head blows, which can be diagnosed only after death. © 2016 The New York Times Company

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 19: Language and Lateralization
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 15: Language and Lateralization
Link ID: 22060 - Posted: 04.01.2016

By Ariana Eunjung Cha In the movie "Concussion," which is based on the life of Bennet Omalu, a doctor who studied traumatic brain injury, Omalu explains that the reason the prognosis is so poor for so many of them is because their symptoms went undiagnosed. When head injuries aren't treated or are under-treated, it puts patients at risk of more serious injury. This is why children with concussions are often asked not to return to class or sports until their symptoms have resolved and adults often have to take days off work. One of the challenges has been that concussions are tricky to diagnose, and it isn't uncommon for a patient to rush to the ER only to be met with a vague response from the doctor about whether there's anything worrisome. Symptoms often aren't apparent for hours or even days after the initial injury, and the imaging technology we have can't pick up anything other than larger bleeds and lesions. How different could things have been if there was a simple blood test to detect a concussion? In a paper published in JAMA Neurology on Monday, researchers reported that they may be closer than ever to such a test. The study involved 600 patients admitted to a trauma center from March 2010 to March 2014. All had suffered some kind of head injury resulting in loss of consciousness, amnesia or disorientation.

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 19: Language and Lateralization
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 15: Language and Lateralization
Link ID: 22047 - Posted: 03.30.2016