Concussion
Head injuries have received a substantial amount of attention in the media these past few years. What is it about concussions that has everyone so concerned? Extensive research and numerous practitioners have been investigating this issue, especially with focus on athletes who are exposed to high volumes of concussions. What are the long-term effects? How can you tell that you’ve had a concussion? What can I do to prevent an injury like this?
What happens with a concussion?
When enough trauma hits the head from an external source, your brain can move away from its safe, suspended space in the cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) and collide with your rigid skull. This damage causes chemical and metabolic changes in the brain cells, hindering their ability to communicate to the rest of the body. This trauma can exist to varying degrees and doesn’t always make itself clear, like a broken limb would be. Being educated on what the symptoms to what for is a vital step for the care of concussions.
Concussion Impacts on Health
Cognitive Motor Function
In a study done by De Beaumont and associates (2007), they assessed concussed athletes alongside the brain’s ability to give motor commands to the body. Their results indicated that people who were exposed to more severe concussions had greater abnormalities in their motor cortex functioning and experienced greater delayed motor responses. Severity of concussion was indicative of decrease in motor cortex function, effects which persisted past the event of the injury. They also found that subsequent concussions exacerbate the unfavourable effects of sport concussions.
Long Term Implications
Professional football players, along with other contact sport athletes, have been observed to show alarming symptoms similar to those of Parkinson’s disease (tremors, slowed movement, posture and balance deficits, slowed speech and writing). They also show deficits with memory and attention. Although these are observed in older athletes, the results are of people who haven’t been exposed to a concussion since young adulthood. With this in mind, studying professionals highly suggest that concussed athletes refrain from entering play until healed, as this exacerbates the potential negative effects and prolongs healing time.
Lassonde (2009) comments on the topic of their results, “This tells you that first of all, concussions lead to attention problems, which we can see using sophisticated techniques such as the EEG,” says Lassonde. “This may also lead to motor problems in young athletes.” The adverse effects on older athletes seem to be more pertinent with long-term investigations, Dr. Lassonde observes the cortex, “a thinning correlated with memory decline and attention decline.”
