Testing before and after injury for athletes of contact sports
October 6th 2008 21:18
Signature Tune
From: The Boston Globe
Winchester High is joining a small but growing number of Massachusetts schools that require a new kind of screening. It uses what look like video games to measure an athlete's baseline brain skills - memory, problem solving, reaction time - before the season. That way, after an injury, a retest can accurately reflect whether the brain is back to normal, allowing a safe return to competition.
"We needed to step up and make sure our student athletes were returning to play safely," said Mark Robinson, Sam's father and president of the Winchester Sports Foundation, the booster club that is paying the $1,000 yearly fee to test Winchester High athletes who play contact sports, from football to cheerleading.
"We saw personally with our own child coming back too soon," he said, "and we knew this was a national issue."
The roughly 30-minute test consists of several games involving flashing images. In one, the test taker is directed to hit the space bar each time they see a repeat image. In another, the goal is to hit the space bar each time a white circle followed by a black square appears in a rapid sequence of varied shapes.
The move toward screening in high school contact sports comes as researchers launch a center at Boston University School of Medicine to scrutinize the long-term effects of repeat concussions in professional athletes.
Over 3.5 million sports and recreation-related concussions occur annually in this country, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, with the majority happening at the high school level. Yet the signs and symptoms may be subtle and often misunderstood by athletic trainers and coaches, resulting in young athletes returning to the field or court too soon. That leaves them vulnerable to repeat concussions, which can create long-term memory, mood and learning problems. Several NFL players have reported debilitating headaches, dizziness and bouts of depression after years of suffering repeat head injuries.
"A great majority of mild concussions are being missed at the high school level," said Dr. Robert Cantu, co-director of the Neurologic Sports Injury Center at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, and the specialist consulted by Winchester High in choosing its pre-season computer testing software.
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