In this day and age, the percentage of the world population that partakes in athletic activities is at an all time high. More and more parents are beginning to get their children involved in sports at a young age so they learn to make friends and stay busy. Programs such as “Pop Warner” and “Tee-ball” teach the youth community the basics of the designated sport to prepare them for more advanced levels in the future. In other words, they are teaching the youth how to be aggressive and win by any means necessary. This is where the worry of countless present and future injuries comes in, particularly brain trauma. Just to put this into perspective, imagine a six-year-old Pop Warner football player participating in the sport up until he retired from the National Football League at the age of thirty-four. That is twenty-eight years of constant direct trauma which causes the brain to essentially shake inside the skull like Jell-O. Of course, not all cases are like this but even playing sports for a short amount of time could be detrimental. Concussions are the leading brain injury amongst athletes that can cause various physical, mental and emotional effects. From blurry vision to extreme irritability to chronic traumatic encephalopathy, this mild traumatic brain injury is not taken as seriously as it should by a portion of the athletic community and that is a scary thought.  Something has to be done and it has to happen fast. Playing high risks sports are not worth the possibility of concussions due to the life-threatening side effects. 

In April of 2014, the National Athletic Trainers’ Association released a position statement on the management of sports concussions. The purpose of this was to provide healthcare professionals such as athletic trainers and physicians with a list of guidelines of what to do in the event of a concussion in minor and emergency instances (Broglio et al. 245.). Also, it clearly states what can happen as a result of this trauma in the short and long term. There has been a 62% increase in ER visits involving traumatic brain injuries between 2001 and 2009 as well as almost four million reported sports concussions in 2013 (Broglio et al. 245.). These outrageous figures prove just how out of control the competitive sporting world has become, especially in contact sports. This position statement being communicated to the public was a massive step for the sports medicine world because not only did it encourage sporting facilities to reassess their concussion guidelines, but also it got the sports medicine practitioners of the United States to all get on the same page in an effort to save lives. 

Concussions and Our Kids, a novel published by Dr. Robert Cantu and Mark Hyman in 2012, is a bestseller on all things concussions. The authors start off with a chapter dedicated to explaining what exactly a concussion is then branch off into specific topics such as second impact syndrome, baseline testing and myths associated with them. In the collision sports chapter, researchers from the University of British Columbia and Simon Fraser University concluded that 34% of youth and adolescent hockey players in the area were returning to play during the same game of sustaining a concussion (Cantu and Hyman 21). This horrific reality paves the way to the possibility of second impact syndrome or post-concussion syndrome. Second impact syndrome is the process of disrupting autoregulation, or the need to maintain a constant blood flow to the brain as a result of another direct blow (Cantu and Hyman 82). On the other hand, post-concussion syndrome is when normal concussion symptoms such as headache, nausea and dizziness last for weeks and even months following the injury. According to the authors, the number of athletes that suffered through these conditions is inconclusive because P.C.S. could be mistaken for another illness and S.I.S. is often fatal and rarely found in an autopsy after an individual has passed (Cantu and Hyman 84). The side effects and outcomes of both supports the idea that playing high risk sports are not worth the possibility because they are well researched and have been proved in countless cases.

Gretchen Reynolds of the New York Times published an article educating and emphasizing the dangers of even just a single concussion. She begins this popular press article by voicing that mild traumatic brain injuries have the potential to have long lasting mental, physical and intellectual affects throughout one’s adulthood (Reynolds). The author incorporated statistics from a Blue Cross Blue Shield to strengthen the beginning of her argument. The report concluded that the concussion rate of people under twenty years of age has skyrocketed by 71% between 2010 and 2015 with the female rate being 119% (Reynolds). Reynolds credited this to parents, coaches and officials becoming more aware of the dangers of concussions. This is an undoubtedly reason and validates just how many concussions in sports have gone undetected in the past. A research study was conducted in Sweden that resulted in finding out rather bizarre side effects that the average person would not think of. Individuals that experienced a single concussion before the age of twenty-five were prone to receiving medical disability, dying prematurely and not graduating high school or college in comparison to someone who did not suffer one (Reynolds). When someone thinks of the aftermath of a concussion, most likely the common side effects like headache, dizziness and nausea come to mind. Is playing a sport really worth the mental and intellectual tolls? 

At the University of Florida, Janie Cournoyer and Dr. Brady Tripp administered a study across eleven high schools in the area to determine how much high school football players know regarding concussions and their symptoms. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention credit football with half of the sustained concussions nationwide as well as expressing that high school football players may not be able to recognize symptoms, take care of injury properly and even reporting serious symptoms to parents, coaches and athletic trainers. After surveying 334 subjects from the various schools, the most commonly identified symptoms were: headache (97%), dizziness (93%) and confusion (90%) (Cournoyer and Tripp 654). The researchers also asked the participants if they were taught about concussions from parents, coaches, neither or both. 200 of the 334 students revealed they received education from their coaches, 180 from parents and almost 90 said they have never been schooled on the injury at all. To put all of this information into perspective, the participants did not have the appropriate level of education about concussions because only three symptoms were most common and the majority even denied signing the required acknowledgement of risk form prior to the season. It is absolutely mind-blowing to know that these adolescents were allowed on the field with little to no education. This research study helps support the thought that playing high risk sports are not worth the dangers because it serves as a model for the entire United States in showing adolescents are very susceptible to concussions from sports due to how little they know about the condition.
