Brain injuries are a very serious issue for players that participate in contact sports like football, boxing, lacrosse, and etc.  Brain injuries can stem from having repeated blows to the head or one big blow to the head or landing the wrong way.  Up until recent modern times it was very hard to study the brain and all that goes on inside your head, so people really did not have a full understanding of the effects that these sports can have on the brain.  With the increasing technology and the increasing awareness surrounding brain trauma and head injuries, scientists have been developing new equipment in order to combat brain trauma and in essence make it safer for these athletes to continue playing the game that they love.  The effects that these sports, especially football, have on the brain and head are detrimental and yet there is still some out there that believe that these sports do not have that effect on the head or brain.  This controversial issue has now gained national attention and there are steps and measures being taken in order to address this issue.  More and more research is being gathered about the issue, scientists are analyzing and coming up with preventative measures to make the game safer, and inventors are coming up with new technology to help see that the proper measures can be taken to ensure the safety of these players.  The issue has been brought before courts and the issue has been brought before the media.  The fact of the matter is, is that concussions and brain damage are no joke and it is finally being taken seriously by doctors, the media, the law.  With the increase in all of this technology and such, major changes to the equipment should be seen within the next few years or so.

Concussion as defined by the Merriam-Webster dictionary is, “a stunning, damaging, or shattering effect from a hard blow; especially: a jarring injury of the brain resulting in disturbance of cerebral function” (Concussion).  So, most concussions happen while the person is still conscious, it is actually rarer than you think that a concussion will cause a person to go unconscious.  If you have to many concussions or repeated blows to the head you can get a brain disease called CTE (Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy), this causes the brain to degenerate.  It is very important that if you are a football player, you learn the symptoms of a concussion so that you can get yourself tested as early as possible.  So, if a player is experiencing headaches, imbalance, hearing or vision change, mood swings, and exhaustion they should definitely seek medical attention to have a concussion test performed (CNN).  Football began as a sport where the only thing that came between your head and the ground was a leather padded helmet, but through the years it has evolved into a highly scientific and protective helmet that can analyze and extrapolate data based on the hits to the helmet.  The brain shakes and rattles against the skull when a concussion is happening so these more efficiently padded helmets help to prevent as much shaking and rattling as they can.  Because of this raised awareness with concussions among sports, many coaches are sitting their players if they even think that they might have a concussion.  More and more people are beginning to look at all the facts and realize that these concussions will have a long term negative effect on the brain if they are let untreated, etc.  

There is a story of a child, Zackery Lystedt, when he was thirteen he got a concussion and was only sidelined for three plays, when he went back in he was hurt 20x worse and so a law was put forth in place.  “In May 2009, the state of Washington passed a new bill called the Lystedt Law, which protects young athletes from the life threating or potentially life-long consequences that returning to the game too soon can cause” (RCW).  This law is very important because receiving concussions at a young age is extremely detrimental to your brain’s health and can impact your brain in the future.  Coming from a person that played the sport of football from the time I was eight years old until I was seventeen this is a crucial new law.  Countless, times I would get hit, land on my head the wrong way, or get rattled and my coach would just tell me to “shake it off”.  The sport of football is an extremely masculine sport, whether you like it or not, so everyone thinks you have to be macho and your weak for coming out for getting a hard hit.  This mindset has to change because too many kids are receiving hits to the head that is damaging their brain and it is effecting them later on in life.

Leaving these hits and blows to the head untreated is all too common in this sport and with the growing awareness of concussions and brain trauma due to this, it is slowly being attacked and getting better.  That’s not to say that it took a few examples for the sport to actually start recognizing that there was a problem.  Concussions among former football players that played the sport for the majority of their life until they retired when undiagnosed.  Because they weren’t treated or anything the hard hits that they received, later in life it can turn into forms of depression, aggression, and brain trauma.  For example, in the case of Junior Seau,  who was an extraordinary linebacker for the San Diego Chargers for the majority of his career, was shot dead at the age of 53 by his own hand.  He took his own life, after playing for almost twenty years in the NFL, being inducted into the Chargers Hall of Fame, and going to the pro bowl ten times.  Even after all of his accomplishments he was still depressed and took his own life.  The reason for this, well upon further examination of his brain posthumously, it was concluded that he suffered from an undiagnosed case of Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE).  Junior Seau’s death left a major impact in the sport of football and has led to much more research and safety measures being taken in order to prevent it from occurring again (Concussions in American Football).  With the rising awareness of this problem more and more studies have been conducted.

The University of Johns Hopkins, a renowned medical school is getting involved in the matter as well.  They wanted to see what percentage of football athletes are exposed to concussions and damage to the brain.  So, in order to understand it and figure this out, they conducted a statistical study.  They chose a small sample size of only 9 retired NFL players and conducted the study.  The participants had retired a few decades ago and they all were considered senior citizens according to AARP standards.  They all varied in positions and etc.  In addition to the 9 retired players they also got 9 players that were healthy and had no reason to be suspected of having brain damage.  The patients went under a series of tests that ranged from a positron emission tomography (PET scan) and MRI’s.  The 9 supposedly healthy participants did not display any proof that they had any brain damage.  However, “the former NFL players had evidence of brain injury in several temporal medial lobe regions, including the amygdala, a region that plays a significant role in regulating mood.  Imaging also identified injuries in many player’s supramarginal gyrus, an area linked to verbal memory.” (Hedin) Other conclusions were also found that linked these former NFL players to have bad memory scores on testing.  Even though the sample size in this study is relatively small and can be deemed inconclusive due to the size, the facts do not lie.  When getting repeatedly hit in the head from football hits, the effects on the brain regions impacted remain around until years after they play and can sometimes be life long and life threatening.  It has not been done yet by Johns Hopkins, but if a larger sample was used and these findings were found in that larger sample consistently, it would be a huge headline and the sport would almost be forced to make major changes to the game due to all the unwanted media attention it would get.

So, with lifelong football players that make a career in the NFL it is very common for them to have developed brain trauma that effects them later on in life and people do not doubt that.  There is also a big issue of undiagnosed concussions on the high school level.  Not only is this detrimental to the players, but this is detrimental to America.  A majority of these kids will never make it to the collegiate or professional level, so they have to make it in the workforce of America.  But if these regular kids keep receiving concussions and keep playing on the high school level without being diagnosed they will suffer brain damage and brain trauma that will greatly impact their future.  Instead of getting all those good grades that you need in order to get into college and then pass college, their memory could’ve been affected.  It may be hard for them to memorize and take in and absorb information that could be vital to them getting a degree.  If they get a degree, it may affect how they do their job and perform in the workforce.  Take a unique situation like this for example, if you were a patient for a plastic surgeon and you are receiving a face lift or whatever you choose to get done and he does a bad job and botches the procedure and now you are left disfigured.  You later come to find out that the reason he botched the procedure was, that due to his high school football days he received many concussions and just played through them and his memory was affected.  He completely forgot to do a step in the procedure because of this memory impairment and because of this you are now left looking like sideshow bob from The Simpsons.  Although the situation just described is very wild and seems almost too much, you never know this could happen and you would not want it happening to you.  This is just another reason for concussions and safety in the sport of football to be taken more seriously and show more concern for hard hits.

Among players in the high school level, many play through concussions and don’t even realize that they are suffering from concussions.  The US National Library of Medicine National Institutes of Health conducted a study among high school football players.  Again, another small sample size was taken, only 24 high school football players were selected.  These selected participants were checked up upon regularly throughout the season and at the end of the season.  It was found that 4 out of the 21 participants that played a full season were diagnosed with concussions.  So for every 21 players roughly 19% of them will be affected by concussions.  They measured the longitudinal impact of collision events by using the HITTM System.  To test the neurocognitive part of the brain they used ImPactTM.  They also used MRI testing to complete the modes of recognizing problems within the brain from a potential concussion (Talvage).  This study is very useful in helping to see the problems associated with brain damage and trauma among players at the high school level.  This stark realization of the fact that high school concussions are going undiagnosed at an alarming rate has prompted a change in the way that concussion tests are being done.  Some kids are passing the current concussion tests even though they have a concussion.  This is on part of the way that the test is designed.  There is a need to improve the test and help the detection pick up on more factors and symptoms that could help diagnose a concussion.  This goes to show how common a concussion can be in the sport of football.

With all of these improvements in technology, concussions and brain damage are now being detected more than they used to.  A study was conducted by renowned neurologist/headache specialist out of Boston, Massachusetts.  The reason for this study is because for a number of years, the NFL had denied concussions in football and claimed that there was no connection between football and serious brain related injuries.  The reason the NFL did this was because if proven true, the billion-dollar industry of the NFL would be greatly effected in a very negative manner.  So, Condi, tired of hearing these false statements conducted a study among alive ex-football players and he discovered that just around 40% of retired NFL players showed evidence of brain damage or a brain structure that is out of the ordinary.  Conidi looked at the heads of 40 ex NFL players who had at least played seven years in the league and that had stopped playing less than five years ago.  The white matter in the brain had been damaged in around 43% of the brains under analysis.  This white matter is what connects your nerve cells to all the different regions in your brain and body.  This is just enough to be generalized as a TBI (Traumatic Brain Injury).  He also concluded that there is a direct relation between the number of years spent in the NFL and the amount of brain damage received.  Although, the amount of concussions does not determine the extent of the brain injury.  Conidi is continuing to scan more and more players attempting to find out what the long term consequences of these traumatic brain injury symptoms can cause (Park).  The only thing that players and parents can do is just try not to use your head as much when tackling or delivering hits and to make sure your kids are using the right safety equipment.  

Reading all these studies and facts is very informative, but sometimes it can be a little hard to understand the full impact of the collision of a hit on the brain.  So to give a visual representation of what happens to the brain when hit by another player, the New York times published a video diagramming and visualizing this impact.  The brain has a jello like consistency and when its hit it reacts exactly like you would think.  It comes as a shockwave upon impact and jiggles through to the end of the brain in waves (Borden).  Through this technology it helps shed a lot of light on what a concussion actually looks like.  There is even more technology out there to help this.  For example, there is sensors in helmets now that can detect brain waves and brain damage when hits are taken on the head.

Concussions and brain damage in the NFL is an issue that went unnoticed and unchanged for countless years, but this is a trend that is being stopped.  Through the increase in technology and awareness, more and more concussions are being diagnosed and addressed as a relevant issue.  Hopefully, the NFL and the entire sport can make some changes for the better and require better safety equipment and testing and this won’t become an issue for much longer.  The faster that this issue can be resolved the faster that the sports that Americans have grown to love and basically worship can get back on without any drama from the medical world.  
