Attention focuses on football’s neurological effects
Friday Night Lights author Buzz Bissinger, writing in Time, looks at two things he claims are being overlooked during the most recent uproar over football injuries: High school athletes and spinal injuries. Bissinger has strong opinions and two anecdotes, one of which includes a source who said that roughly two Texas high school football players suffer catastrophic spinal injuries each year.
Bissinger praises Alan Schwarz’ work on concussions at The New York Times, but openly doubts whether the advances Schwarz is helping force at the professional level will ever translate to high school.
I know the focus will not trickle down to where it is needed most: the high school level. Research has shown that young players are far more susceptible than older ones to serious injuries. …
There should be an ambulance at every high school game. There should be trainers. But don’t bet on it, as school districts cry a lack of money. Kids will continue to suffer serious head injuries. Kids will continue to become paralyzed because they never learned how to properly tackle, with their heads up. The game’s violence will continue because that’s exactly why we like it, our gladiatorial lust still intact 16 centuries after the Romans. The bigger the hit, the greater the roar.
Not a new concern
In an Op-Ed piece in The New York Times, Deborah Blum, a professor of science journalism at the University of Wisconsin, writes about a warning published in The Journal of the American Medical Association that said the medical profession can no longer ignore that “There is a very definite brain injury due to single or repeated blows on the head or jaw which cause multiple concussion hemorrhages” in a report about professional athletes.”
But what really makes the research and its conclusions so interesting is its timing: it appeared in The Journal of the American Medical Association on Oct. 13, 1928. This raises the question – at least for me – as to why we are announcing the athlete concussion-dementia link as a new, and still somewhat debatable, issue some 80 years later.
House Judiciary forum
Watch a video webcast of the Feb. 1 “House Judiciary Committee Forum on Head Injuries and Other Sports Injuries in Youth, High School, College and Professional Football,” or read about Republican’s reluctance to hold said forum in Houston.
Dan Rather report
Dan Rather’s latest investigative effort was a far-reaching look at concussions and football, with emphasis on both the high school and professional games. He frames it as part of the pre-Super Bowl concussion awareness push (PDF Transcript).
ESPN to air ‘Head Games’
ESPN reporter Greg Garber, on “Outside the Lines,” will look at the issue of concussions and the NFL at 8 a.m. ET on Sunday. Harold Donald Carson, a former linebacker and inductee into the Pro Football Hall of Fame, “has become one of the leading spokesmen for the NFL’s retired players. Passionate and eloquent, he is in some ways the league’s conscience on the subject.”
Carson, who played 13 seasons for the New York Giants, estimates he suffered about a dozen concussions during his career, but none of them were documented. While he believes concussions among former football players will escalate into an epidemic, Dr. Joseph Maroon, the Steelers’ neurosurgeon for nearly three decades and a member of the NFL’s concussion committee for the past three years, disputes that:
“Because we know that there are millions of high school kids, college kids, youth leagues, as well as other who play football annually, I think we are not seeing the epidemic at that level people are speculating about,” Maroon said.
Related
- Advanced MRI reveals damage in brains of retired NFL football players
- Tim Tebow’s head fuels concussion debate
- Technology in play to help make football safer
- Brain damage caused by football is cumulative
- ‘Playing through’ concussions is damaging
NYT’s Schwarz discusses football concussion beat
For the Columbia Journalism Review, Brent Cunningham talked to The New York Times‘ Alan Schwarz about his work as the nation’s leading (and probably only) full-time football head injury reporter. Schwarz, whose work covering concussions brought him to the Times in 2007, talks about how he got started on the beat and how his work has impacted the sport as a whole.
It’s all interesting stuff, especially when he discusses how his background in mathematics has helped him report on sports injuries and medicine, but the real payoff comes when Cunningham finally gets Schwarz to divulge his personal stance on concussions in youth football. It’s a crystallization of all Schwarz has learned, as well as a delicate balancing act between his personal and professional ethics.
Photo by Eagle102.net via Flickr
CJR: Let’s assume for a minute that your son, who you said is three years old, is actually ten years old and he is clamoring to play Pop Warner football. Would the fact that you would then have to decide disqualify you from covering the story?
Schwarz: No, it wouldn’t disqualify me, though of course that’s up to my editors. But there is something about working here—and I’m not saying we’re better than everyone else, blah, blah, blah—but there is something that really inspires you to do the right thing, and to do the thing that helps you to cultivate the trust that allows readers to take you seriously. So I would probably let him play because if I didn’t it would compromise the reporting. It would compromise the trust that others and even the league may have in me. Now, I would not send him out to slaughter, but getting one concussion is not that big of a deal—it just isn’t. And to suggest otherwise is incredibly irresponsible. So if my kid gets one concussion then yeah, he doesn’t play anymore probably. But to not allow him on the field is, frankly, an overreaction. And if I didn’t allow him to play then yeah, it would be harder to cover the story, if only in my own mind. I believe that the cost to others of my not being able to cover this story as well would be greater than the cost of my kid getting one concussion and never playing again. I’m a very mathematical guy. I follow certain precepts. And those are the things that make sense to me. And I can’t tell my kid he can’t play, because then what am I going to tell the league? What am I going to tell my editors? It doesn’t work. It’s dissonant.
Related
- Tip sheet: Concussions in young athletes
- Tim Tebow’s head fuels concussion debate
- Technology in play to help make football safer
- Brain damage caused by football is cumulative
- ‘Playing through’ concussions is damaging
House holds hearing on brain injuries in NFL
The House of Representatives is holding a hearing on “Legal Issues Relating to Football Head Injuries” that is being webcast on C-SPAN.org.
The witness list includes NFL commissioner Roger S. Goodell as well as the director of the players association, team executives, doctors, neurologists, retired players, families of former players and safety advocates.
Related
The New York Times: NFL Data Reinforces Dementia Links
NCAA doesn’t monitor painkiller use
Gene Sapakoff of the Charleston, S.C. Post and Courier reports that while the NCAA and the Atlantic Coast Conference went to the mat this summer over bagel quality in relation to an “ACC rules proposal seeking to specify ‘that an institution may provide fruit, nuts and bagels to student-athletes at any time,’” collegiate sports’ governing body doesn’t have any system in place to track or regulate the injections and painkillers given on a regular basis to many student-athletes.
Photo by Monica’s Dad via Flickr
…the NCAA wouldn’t know if a South Carolina or Clemson player received one Toradol shot or 30 last week, or if a given school under its wide jurisdiction was refilling infamously addictive OxyContin and Vicodin prescriptions by the shovelful.
“The NCAA does not monitor that from a national standpoint,” said Mary Wilfert, the NCAA’s Associate Director of Health and Safety. “That is left to the institutions and also left to those professional and legal and ethical regulatory bodies that folks in those fields operate under.”
The NCAA sources Sapakoff consulted said that monitoring painkillers and other drugs given to student-athletes, while a good idea, would be a “gargantuan task” beyond the association’s resources.
“Just way too much to try and get a handle on. Simple as that, unfortunately,” said an NCAA official, requesting anonymity. “We just don’t have the staff as it is.”
Sapakoff’s series on painkillers in football also looked at high schools and the NFL.
Technology in play to help make football safer
A new multimedia effort from ESPN combines stories, video and graphics to show how technological innovators are working to make football a safer sport.
Photo by Eagle102.net via Flickr
Patrick Dorsey looks at one of the biggest health issues facing football players today, especially those in high school, writing about the continuing evolution of concussion diagnosis, prevention and treatment. Dorsey takes a look at advances in equipment, like a new $350 helmet that uses airbag-style padding to soften the blows taken by players’ heads, and in medicine. On the medical front, many schools now give students a pre-season test to establish their baseline mental function, then test them again after a suspected concussion and only allow them to play again once their brain is working normally once more.
Matt Winklejohn tackles another threat to football players’ health: the heat. Promising advances have produced sensors that measure the temperature inside each player’s helmet and wire the results to a handheld computer on the sidelines, shoulder pads that can be air-conditioned during breaks in practice and even a thermometer built into a pill athletes can swallow in order to monitor their internal core temperature, Winklejohn writes.
Relevant ESPN videos
Football Tech: Helmets
Football Tech: Shoulder Pads
Football Tech: Performance Gear
Relevant ESPN graphics
ZOOM Gallery: The evolution of football gear
Crosshairs: The world of football technology
Related
Find a primer on reporting on the health of student athletes and links to a number of articles, tip sheets, journal articles and other resources in AHCJ’s new “Reporting on sports injuries in school-age children” tip sheet and “Concussions in young athletes.”
- Computer software used to evaluate sports concussions
- Former NFL players still taking hits
- NFL’s concussions expert sells equipment to league
- Football players hide concussions; increasing risk of injury, death
- Athletes to donate brains to concussion research
- High school players at risk of ’second-impact syndrome’
Brain damage caused by football is cumulative
The Philadelphia Daily News has released “Deadly Aftershocks,” an in-depth look at the effect of the day-to-day bumps and knocks of a football career on players’ brains. Reporter Mark Kram talked to brain researchers who found damage associated with chronic traumatic encephalopathy was almost common among football players; even athletes as young as 18 showed some indications of it.
Cross-section of the human brain, courtesy of the NIH.
According to Kram’s sources, the only way to overcome the sport’s macho culture of shaking off injuries and jogging back into the fray would be to set up strict guidelines designed to protect the players from themselves.
The brain damage caused by football is cumulative and slow to develop, which makes it particularly tricky to prevent during the heat of athletic competition. Kram looks at the human and physical destruction wrought by this incremental descent into CTE through a series of anecdotes and profiles, drawing the story together with medical and physiological research.
Stories in the package:
- Deadly aftershocks
- A rich and varied portfolio in brain bank
- Athletes donating their brains to study
- How the NFL manages concussions
- NFL studying long-term effects of concussions
- PDF: A look inside the brain
Related
AHCJ has some resources about brain injuries:
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Health Journalism 2010, AHCJ's annual conference, features a world-class program with story ideas, sources, stronger reporting skills, chances to meet newsmakers and network with other journalists.
- Health and education: Covering these intersecting beats
- Reporting on the business of health care
- Health reporting resources for journalists on state and local government beats
- Shortened Lives: How location, lifestyle affect health
- Covering a complex story for the long haul
- Aging in the 21st Century: Presentations and tip sheets
- AHCJ calls for better information from Joint Commission Web site
