By: Akshay Karthik
The unfortunate events during an NFL Game have shocked the world in the past few days. In the middle of the game, one player suffered a seizure on the field and had to be immediately driven to emergency care. If the response team had been just a few minutes later, the NFL would have had a tragedy on their own fields. Luckily, the player is doing well now, and his neurological functions seem almost normal. Yet this scare has brought the longstanding question back into the light: what effects do contact sports have on the brain? There are an estimated 1.7 to 3.8 million traumatic brain injuries annually in the United States alone. According to the CDC (Center for Disease Control and Prevention), most injuries are due to contracted sports like American Football. Amongst American children and adolescents, sports and recreational activities contribute to over 21 percent of all traumatic brain injuries.
Contact sports are not only known to be a significant source of injuries of the parts of the brain, such as musculoskeletal apparatus but also have significant relations to concussions and sub-concussions. Subconcussive head impacts accumulate throughout the active sports career and thus can cause measurable deficits and changes to brain health. Emerging research in cumulative sub-concussions in contact sports has revealed several associated markers of brain injury. For example, recent studies discovered that repeated headers in soccer cause measurable signs of cognitive impairment and are also related to a prolonged cortical silent period in transcranial magnetic stimulation measurements. Other cognitive and neuroimaging biomarkers are also pointing to adverse effects of heading. A range of fluid biomarkers completes the picture of the cumulative effects of subconcussive impacts. Those accumulating effects can cause significant cognitive impairment in active contact sports women and men later in life. Sustaining an injury while playing sports can range from mild physical trauma such as a scalp contusion or laceration to severe TBI with concurrent bleeding in the brain or coma. It is essential to recognize when a head trauma is severe or has resulted in a TBI because it is crucial to seek immediate medical attention. While most brain injuries are self-limiting, with symptoms resolving in a week, a growing amount of research has now established that the sequelae from recurrent minor impacts are significant in the long term.
Types of Neurological Injuries
A Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI)- is a type of brain injury that arises when an extremely powerful blow penetrates the head. As a result, ordinary functions of the brain are disrupted. TBI can result when the head suddenly and violently hits an object or when an object pierces the skull and enters brain tissue.
Concussions- frequently affect athletes in both contact and non-contact sports and are considered diffuse brain injuries that traumatically induce alterations of mental status. A concussion may result from shaking the brain within the skull and, if severe, can cause shearing injuries to nerve fibers and neurons.
Coma- refers to a profound state of unconsciousness. An individual in a coma is alive but cannot respond to their environment. The unconscious state has variability and may be very deep, where no amount of stimulation will cause the person to respond or, in other cases, the person in a coma may move, make noise or react to pain but is unable to obey simple, one-step commands such as "hold up two fingers" or "stick out your tongue." Although higher brain functions like thinking are impaired, critical functions like breathing and circulation remain intact in comatose patients. It seems that, especially for children with ADHD and ADD, many neurologists state that contact sports aren't for them perhaps because their mind is already so "fragile" that a concussion or a coma could put them into a harsher situation.
Most experts agree that individual sports are better for kids whose ADHD isn't well controlled. Team contact sports are the worst. "They have a hard time grasping the 'play system,'" explains Robert Giabardo, athletic director at Summit Camp for Youth with Attention Deficit Disorders in Honesdale, Pennsylvania. To participate in a game such as football, the player must always be focused not only on his or her role in the game but must also be aware of the actions and physical placement of other players at all times. Maintaining keen focus and acute awareness is challenging for any child. For kids with ADHD, it's almost impossible. "Often, they do not look around at other players and get hit or hurt during plays," Giabardo says. Generally, children with ADHD do better when they get plenty of individual attention from coaches. That's why they're more likely to succeed with individual sports such as swimming and diving, wrestling, martial arts, and tennis — or even more rarified endeavors such as fencing and horseback riding. Even though these sports may be "individual," children with ADHD still derive many social benefits from being on a team because they're frequently taught in groups with other kids. "In the case of swimming, wrestling, and tennis, they often are on teams," says Quinn. "It's just that the effort and instruction are individual."
Bibliography
Niktas, M. (2022). Repeated sub-concussive impacts and the negative effects of contact sports on cognition and Brain Integrity. International journal of environmental research and public health. Retrieved January 8, 2023, from https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35742344/#:~:text=Contact%20sports%20are%20not%20only,and%20changes%20to%20brain%20health.
Khoi, T. (2020). Sports-related head injury. AANS. Retrieved January 8, 2023, from https://www.aans.org/Patients/Neurosurgical-Conditions-and-Treatments/Sports-related-Head-Injury
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