(Press-News.org) A slight majority of concussions happened during youth football games but most concussions at the high school and college levels occurred during practice, according to an article published online by JAMA Pediatrics.
Football is a popular youth sport with approximately 3 million youth athletes, 1.1 million high school athletes and 100,000 college athletes playing tackle football each year. A report on concussion by the Institute of Medicine highlighted the need for more extensive data on incidence in athletes from youth to college.
Thomas P. Dompier, Ph.D., A.T.C., of the Datalys Center for Sports Injury Research and Prevention Inc., Indianapolis, and coauthors used data collected as part of three large injury surveillance systems: the Youth Football Surveillance System included 118 youth football teams, providing 4,092 athlete seasons (one player participating in one season); the National Athletic Treatment, Injury and Outcomes Network included 96 secondary school football programs, providing 11,957 athlete-seasons; and the National Collegiate Athletic Association Injury Surveillance Program included 24 member institutions, providing 4,305 athlete-seasons.
The study found that during the 2012 and 2013 seasons there were 1,198 concussions reported with 141 (11.8 percent) of them in youth athletes, 795 (66.4 percent) in high school athletes and 262 (21.9 percent) in college athletes. Concussions accounted for 9.6 percent, 4 percent and 8 percent of all injuries reported in the youth, high school and college football groups, respectively.
The results indicate 53.9 percent of concussions occurred during youth football games but in high school and college most concussions (57.7 percent and 57.6 percent, respectively) happened during practice. No concussions were reported in youth football players who were ages 5 to 7 years, although the young players accounted for more than 7,000 athlete exposures (AEs, one player participating in one game or one practice).
In games, the college concussion rate (3.74 per 1,000 AEs) was higher than those reported in high school (2.01 per 1,000 AEs) and youth athletes (2.38 per 1,000 AEs). In practice, the college concussion rate (0.53 per 1,000 AEs) was lower than that in high school (0.66 per 1,000 AEs), according to the study.
Youth football had the lowest one-season concussion risks in 2012 (3.53 percent) and 2013 (3.13 percent). The one-season concussion risk was highest in high school (9.98 percent) and college (5.54 percent) in 2012.
"The rate of concussion in youth players was generally not different from those in high school and college players compared with other injuries. However, football practices were a major source of concussion at all three levels of competition. Concussions during practice might be mitigated and should prompt an evaluation of technique and head impact exposure. Although it is more difficult to change the intensity or conditions of a game, many strategies can be used during practice to limit play-to-player contact and other potentially injurious behaviors," the study concludes.
INFORMATION:
(JAMA Pediatr. Published online May 4, 2015. doi:10.1001/jamapediatrics.2015.0210. Available pre-embargo to the media at http://media.jamanetwork.com.)
Editor's Note: An author made a conflict of interest disclosure. Funding for this study was provided by USA Football, the National Athletic Trainers' Association Research and Education Foundation, BioCrossroads in partnership with the Central Indiana Corporate Partnership Foundation, and the National Collegiate Athletic Association. The authors made conflict of interest and funding/support disclosures. Please see article for additional information, including other authors, author contributions and affiliations, etc.
Media Advisory: To contact corresponding author Thomas P. Dompier, Ph.D., A.T.C., call 317-275-3664 or email tdompier@datalyscenter.org
To place an electronic embedded link to this study in your story Links will be live at the embargo time: http://archpedi.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?doi=10.1001/jamapediatrics.2015.0210
Policy changes in California to make the food and beverages that compete with school meal programs more healthy for students appear to have improved childhood overweight/obesity prevalence trends, although improvement was better among students attending schools in socioeconomically advantaged neighborhoods, according to an article published online by JAMA Pediatrics.
Many school districts have adopted policies to regulate so-called competitive food and beverages (CF&Bs) because of childhood obesity. California has enacted among the most comprehensive CF&B policies in ...
In the history of continental drift, India has been a mysterious record-holder.
More than 140 million years ago, India was part of an immense supercontinent called Gondwana, which covered much of the Southern Hemisphere. Around 120 million years ago, what is now India broke off and started slowly migrating north, at about 5 centimeters per year. Then, about 80 million years ago, the continent suddenly sped up, racing north at about 15 centimeters per year -- about twice as fast as the fastest modern tectonic drift. The continent collided with Eurasia about 50 million ...
Researchers at the Babraham Institute and the Francis Crick Institute have developed and used a new technique to join the dots in the genomic puzzle. Just as a dot to dot puzzle needs to be completed to visualise the full picture, the researchers' analysis connected regulatory elements called promoters and enhancers and showed their physical interactions over long distances within the mouse and human genomes. The ability to map promoter-enhancer interactions in the human genome has huge potential in understanding the genetic basis of disease.
Our development as an embryo ...
Cambridge, MA - States will gain large, widespread, and nearly immediate health benefits if EPA sets strong standards in the final Clean Power Plan, according to the first independent, peer-reviewed paper of its kind, published today in the journal Nature Climate Change.
The researchers analyzed three options for power plant carbon standards. The top option in the study prevents an expected 3,500 premature deaths in the US every year, with a range of 780 to up to 6100. It also averts more than a thousand heart attacks and hospitalizations annually from air pollution-related ...
Researchers at the University of Rochester have shown that defects on an atomically thin semiconductor can produce light-emitting quantum dots. The quantum dots serve as a source of single photons and could be useful for the integration of quantum photonics with solid-state electronics - a combination known as integrated photonics.
Scientists have become interested in integrated solid-state devices for quantum information processing uses. Quantum dots in atomically thin semiconductors could not only provide a framework to explore the fundamental physics of how they interact, ...
Using brain tumor samples collected from children in the United States and Europe, an international team of scientists found that the drug panobinostat and similar gene regulating drugs may be effective at treating diffuse intrinsic pontine gliomas (DIPG), an aggressive and lethal form of pediatric cancer. The study, published in Nature Medicine, was partially funded by the National Institutes of Health, the Department of Defense, and more than 25 nonprofit foundations devoted to finding cures for childhood brain cancer.
"Our results provide a glimmer of hope for treating ...
Huntington's disease is caused by a mutation in the Huntington's disease gene, but it has long been a mystery why some people with the exact same mutation get the disease more severely and earlier than others. A closer look at the DNA around the Huntington's disease (HD) gene offers researchers a new understanding of how the gene is controlled and how this affects the disease. These findings set the stage for new treatments to delay or prevent the onset of this devastating brain disease.
Huntington's disease is a genetic disorder that gets passed down in families, but ...
Malmö, Sweden, May 4, 2015 -- A team of researchers from Sweden and the United States have examined the potential role of the family environment and neighborhood factors on mental health outcomes in a new study published in Journal of Psychiatric Research.
The study includes highly detailed data on over 500,000 children in Sweden and covers a timespan of more than a decade.
A total of 542,195 children were tracked for 11 years for incident internalizing (anxiety and mood) and externalizing (ADHD and conduct) disorders. During the course of the study, 4.8 percent ...
Considering geological time scales, the occurrence of biogenic shale gas in Sweden´s crust is relatively young. An international team of geoscientists (led by Hans-Martin Schulz, German Research Centre for Geosciences GFZ) found that biogenic methane in the Alum Shale in South Sweden formed due to deglaciation around 12.000 years ago. Moreover, the formation processes were due to complex interactions between neotectonic activity and the occurrence of a deep biosphere. Applying a new hydrogeochemical modelling approach, the specific methane generation process was unravelled ...
Hyalella azteca are invertebrates that are widely used for sediment and water toxicity studies. Investigators have found that H. azteca collected from sites influenced by agricultural/urban runoff are as much as 2-times less sensitive to pyrethroid insecticides than lab-grown H. azteca. In contrast, the insecticide sensitivities of H. azteca collected from undeveloped sites beyond the influences of agricultural/urban runoff were similar to those of lab-grown populations.
The results suggest that standard compliance testing of ambient waters, stormwater, and agricultural ...
