18
04.27.2015
Sports
GMUFOURTHESTATE.COM @IVESTATE
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Concussions: a national epidemic IAN CRIMAN / STAFF WRITER
It’s 4 a.m., and a test is looming. There are five more pages to read, so sleep is an afterthought. After reading a paragraph, the time starts to catch up and nothing gets retained. Eventually sleep becomes a more viable option and concern about a test grade flies out the window. This is a common problem that students face, and those who suffer from concussions feel these problems magnified. They cannot sleep it off and study harder for the next test, this tired feeling exists all the time and affects every activity.
“We used to have a protocol where if you had two concussions in a season, you wouldn’t be able to play anymore that year and we would diagnose specific concussions as grade one, grade two, grade three, really depending on the symptoms that a student was showing,” said Robinson Secondary School athletic trainer Jeff Perry. “It’s a little uncomfortable that that’s not there anymore, but if there’s no medical reason that you can’t play this season some people still go by the old doctrine that you have to play through everything.”
athlete exhibits symptoms of the injury. “You try to look at everything individually because it really depends on what symptoms you’re going to get,” Perry said. “You may not get any physical symptoms. Two or three days later, the individual might feel disoriented or they may have trouble remembering information and they would be referred to us then.” This access has made things a lot easier for people who are experiencing symptoms to test and find out the next steps to figure out what they’re dealing with.
“I would try and do homework, but it would only make my headache worse,” said Kevin Balibay, a senior neuroscience major. “I suffered a concussion playing flag football and my symptoms affected everything I did. It happened in the beginning of the semester and I might as well have taken the first two weeks off, because I barely remember anything from that.”
“I’ve had six concussions in my life,” said senior anthropology major Danny Wegerbauer. “When I first got a concussion in 2000, my doctors didn’t diagnose it as a concussion, they just told me to sleep for three days.” Another benefit of focused research is that there are concussion specialists that only deal with the one injury. They know every possible symptom a patient might have that might lead to a traumatic brain injury, and can diagnose the injury far quicker now.
Chris Borland, a rookie linebacker for the San Francisco 49ers, who retired from the NFL in March cited longterm concerns that head trauma has on the body. This was unprecedented and reignited the national debate on the significance of traumatic brain injuries and their long-term effects. Each individual case is different, but doctors and concussion specialists are more aware of all of the symptoms that could indicate the presence of injury. In the majority of cases, most individuals don’t know they’ve had a concussion until a day or two later, when something feels off.
“The difference in care in treating my last concussion was insane,” Wegerbauer said. “My doctors did a far better job with not sending me back to school until I was ready, until I was completely symptom-free. When I had my second concussion in 2004, I sat out of school for a week and then they put me right back in. I wasn’t able to read like I normally could for a month.” Wegerbauer self-diagnosed his last concussion. When he was in a lecture, he raised his hand to ask his professor a question. This is when Wegerbauer realized he may have an injury, everything was moving more slowly than normal.
“I didn’t know I had a concussion until two days after it happened,” Balibay said. “It was the worst headache I ever had. When it comes down to doing any kind of activity, it just makes the problem worse. The best way to describe it is that cloudy feeling in your head, you find yourself re-reading a paragraph over and over again and you can’t retain any of the information you’re trying to process.” According to the North Carolina Medical Journal, the working definition of a sports-related concussion is: “[occurring] from an external force or blow to the head or body that causes an alteration in neurologic functioning, with impairment in concentration, working memory and executive functioning. Additional problems that can occur include headaches, insomnia, emotional liability, dizziness and fatigue.” Public awareness of the injury has also grown exponentially in the 2000s. In 2013, PBS’ Frontline published the documentary “League of Denial” that chronicled NFL officials’ refusal to believe that contact sports had a direct correlation with the symptoms that many retired players faced on a day-to-day basis. The NFL fought against the science of the day for years on this, and the documentary compared the fight to big tobacco’s fight against the correlation between tobacco and lung cancer. People are becoming increasingly aware of the injury, and this has led to increased measures to take care of individuals who experience a concussion.
“I would do stuff for an hour and would just hit a wall,” Wegerbauer said. “Looking at a computer screen, talking with friends, background noise, just living life makes the headache worse. It feels like the world is moving twice as fast as you are able to. This makes schoolwork really challenging, it is hard to connect ideas.” (WALTER MARTINEZ / FOURTH ESTATE)
One of the positive consequences of this research is that high schools and colleges are more effective in dealing with the injury now, as the symptoms can affect day-to-day life. Five years ago, there were two specialized concussion clinics in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area. One was located in Washington, D.C. and the other was in Rockville, Maryland. There are three in Fairfax County alone now. Head coaches are required to know the symptoms of one so they can test a student-athlete who may have experienced a traumatic brain injury. Policies are now in place that limits an athlete’s participation following a suspected concussion -- athletes can only return to playing if they are deemed completely symptom-free. While head coaches aren’t expected to diagnose the injury, it takes far more specialization and training, they are expected to know the policies on concussions and take a player out if the
It would be easy for trainers to tell the athlete that they could not play anymore for the rest of the year if they experience multiple traumatic brain injuries. The conflict arises when the competitive nature of the athlete comes in play; they may not want to be as careful about reporting the injury in that instance. “You still get people who don’t educate themselves, who are stuck in 1985,” Perry said. “Unfortunately, it’s taken some tragic events to increase awareness on the injury. If you don’t know anything about concussions nowadays, you don’t follow sports that much; it’s always on the news.”