Sports is filled with tough calls. Safe or out. Offsides or not. Traveling or incidental movement.
Well, here’s another tough call: Do I let my kid play when the news says he or she might get a concussion?
To shed some light on the matter, we had an excellent interview with two UHealth experts in the field – Gillian Hotz, Ph.D., the director of the concussion program and Kids Neuroscience Center, and Michael Hoffer, M.D., director of the Department of Otolaryngology’s Vestibular and Balance Program.
A concussion, said Hotz, is a biomechanical force applied to the brain. It can happen in many ways, and it’s important to remember that there are different levels of intensity in sports and different stages of brain development at different ages.
“We have to understand that when you say the word ‘concussion,’ there are a lot of different things that it means depending on age and stage or sport and the mechanism of injury you’re talking about,” she said.
CTE (chronic traumatic encephalopathy), added Hoffer, is a medical diagnosis after death.
The diagnosis notes changes in the brain that had not been seen before. The common denominator in almost all cases is multiple traumatic blows.
Scary stuff, especially for parents whose kids play contact sports. But Hotz cautioned us that while all of the research is in a very early stage, the reporting of it has led to a bit of hysteria. We need take a step back and consider the evidence more thoroughly.
“I think we have to say to parents out there that we really don’t know enough right now at these younger ages, and the positives outweigh the negatives of kids playing on team sports,” she said.
Ditto, said Hoffer. “CTE has been identified in a very small subset of NFL players, and these NFL players played at a time when concussion wasn’t being paid attention to. So they were getting multiple blows with less protection and less medical attention. We don’t even know if the current generation of NFL players will get this, let alone kids who play high school ball or youth league ball. And we really want kids to be out there on the field playing,” he said.
One of the keys to safety, said Hotz, is to make sure a qualified professional is on-hand at the sporting event to recognize the symptoms of a concussion and initiate treatment immediately.
Those symptoms include headache, dizziness, trouble concentrating, ringing in the ears and general fatigue.
Hotz said the Kids Neuroscience Center at UHealth has developed a concussion protocol model that is being applied to high school sports in Miami-Dade County. It includes pre-screening as well as sideline and clinic evaluations.
Hoffer said UHealth has also developed an objective test that can identify a concussion within 12 minutes and with a 90 percent accuracy.
You can learn more online at http://www.uconcussion.com/.
Click here to listen to the full interview with Gillian Hotz, Ph.D., the director of the concussion program and Kids Neuroscience Center at UHealth and Michael Hoffer, M.D., director of the UHealth Department of Otolaryngology’s Vestibular and Balance Program.
