Football pre-season is in full swing which means inevitable head injuries. The younger the player, the more serious the affect of a permanently maiming traumatic brain injury called a concussion. Kessler Foundation Director of Traumatic Brain Injury Research Dr. Nancy Chiaravalloti has a radical response to her long-term research: suggesting tackle football be banned until high school. She joins NJTV News Anchor Mary Alice Williams to discuss her findings and what can be done to prevent and protect against concussions in young children.
Research has shown that younger children are at greater risk of concussion for a variety of reasons. Chiaravalloti says one of which is the size of their neck and the strength of their neck. “They’re still underdeveloped,” she said. “If you think about what happens when perhaps you’re jolted in a car, your neck is what stabilizes your head and that happens when there’s a hit on the football field. So an experienced, well-developed athlete, their neck is stronger. In our youth necks are substantially weaker, so what happens inside the head is the brain gets jostled a little bit more and that puts them at an increased risk of concussion.”
She also says that because concussions are fairly common, happening a lot on the athletic field, they tend not to demand the type of severity as brain injuries. “Another reason is the symptoms do seem transient. Someone may have lightheadedness, headaches. That subsides, it does get better. But what does linger, or what can linger, are difficulties with cognitive functioning or thinking abilities. Those difficulties may seem very, very subtle, and sometimes they’re not even recognized, but what the research has shown is that they build over the years,” she said.
Even years later, concussions can greatly affect a person. “They may have a myriad of symptoms and that may depends on the number of concussions they’ve had, the severity of the concussions they’ve had, but what can happen later in life if someone may have difficulty with their memory function, have trouble remembering things in their everyday world, have trouble learning new information and they also may have emotional difficulties,” Chiaravalloti said.
There have been a lot of advancement and attention on preventing head injuries and concussions among young athletes. Some high school athletes are getting baseline brain scans so they know what their brain looks like. Others are taught about symptoms and what to look out for. Others have rules preventing athletes from playing for a month following a head injury. Another strategy is a type of play called Heads Up training that helps to teach players the correct way to hit and tackle while playing football. Chiaravalloti says [that]while heads up training is a good start and great for professional athletes, it may not the best strategy for children.
“When you’re thinking about an 8-year-old, 9-year-old, 10-year-old out on the football field, and they’re in a position where they are in a play and tackling, it’s very difficult for someone at that age to remember ‘keep my head up and lead with my shoulder.’ So I think while heads up training may be very effective for our older and more experienced athletes, I think there is concern with the younger athletes and their ability to actually carry through on that type of a technique,” she said.
Chiaravalloti and her colleagues have done a substantial amount of work on a technique called the Modified Story Memory Technique. This techniques teaches a person to use imagery and context to facilitate learning in those with memory loss.
“Our research has shown that by doing that, what we’re actually doing is engaging additional regions of the brain in the task of learning information. So what previously may have largely gone for one region of the brain for information to become solidified is now engaging additional areas in creating a mental image surrounding an idea and putting it into a larger context,” she said. “The treatment we’ve developed in a 10 session treatment protocol, so it’s not very long. It’s usually done twice a week for five weeks and by the end we’re seeing brain changes.”
And the best news? It works on people of all ages. “It’s definitely something that someone can learn at a very young age,” Chiaravalloti said. “They’re very simple techniques that teach someone to take verbal information, or words, and create a mental image around it. So it’s creating a greater context around that image and making it easier to remember at a later time. It’s very simple.”