There is still so much work to do in the world of sports in relation to protecting participants from brain injury. There has been repeated calls in football, for instance to limit the amount of headers players must make by tweaking the rules and while heading has been restricted in younger players, football may need to adapt going forward.
Other sports like rugby and of course boxing have made strides but injuries and longer term conditions resulting from continuous brain impact are still widespread in the field of sports.
Even the effects of a concussion can last for over a year, manifesting in changes in white matter, blood flow and the connections within the brain! Early return to sports can lead to heightened risk of neurodegenerative disease.
The importance of looking into sport-related brain injuries has recently been hammered home somewhat by the results of a study that has shown that the symptoms of Traumatic Brain Injuries (TBIs) in sports linger long after the initial injury.
The study was carried out by the University of Stirling in collaboration with the University of Glasgow and recently published in JAMA Network Open. The study used data from 4,360 patients from 18 European countries who had attended hospital with TBI and had undergone a brain scan.
The research culminated in the finding that almost 50% of people who suffer from a sport-related TBI are still suffering from symptoms after six months.
Professor Willie Stewart, who works as a consultant neuropathologist and Honorary Professor at the University of Glasgow co-authored the study and stated:
“This work demonstrates that for up to a third of people attending hospital with so called mild traumatic brain injuries from sport, the injury is anything but ‘mild’ with persisting symptoms reported at 6 months.”
One interesting finding was that individuals suffering sport-related TBIs did tend to recover better than those with non-sport-related TBIs. In terms of details, this manifested in reduced post-concussion symptoms such as anxiety and PTSD.
This may or may not be a result of having more support, access to high quality care and a team around them in certain cases. Professor Lindsay Wilson from the University of Stirling’s Division of Psychology and a senior author of the study, is quoted as saying:
“It is usually thought that people with sport-related TBI will have good outcomes, particularly if they have an injury that is classified as mild, but these patients have never been compared to those with non-sport-related TBI on a range of different outcomes.”
The results of this study showed that while initially sport-related subjects fared better, the two groups (sport-related and non-sport-related) fared similarly over the long term.
An additional finding from the study was that there are definitely sports that are more frequently associated with a TBI. Horse riding was the biggest outlier, with 22% of all cases happening while riding a horse, with skiing (17%) and football (13%) the other biggest culprits.
Birchwood & Co Case Management understand that the knock-on effects of the findings of this study are potentially enormous as the results strongly suggest that many individuals who have suffered a TBI will benefit from continuous check-ups for a longer period of time than has previously been the case.
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