concussions

As the Ravens take on the 49ers in New Orleans this weekend during the 47th Super Bowl, physicians will be on the lookout for more head injuries. There were over 160 in the 2012-13 NFL season, and it's become a larger problem as players get bigger and stronger.

The problem is that many concussions go undetected. Impakt Protective's Shockbox is a helmet g-force sensor that measures the impact a player sustains and gauges whether a medical assessment is in order.

The device can fit into any helmet with space amid the interior padding so that it's right … Read more

Chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a degenerative brain disease thought to play a role in the deaths (which are sometimes suicides) of athletes, soldiers, and others who have suffered concussions and repeated hits to the head, is currently only able to be diagnosed postmortem.

"After a while it gets old and not so fulfilling to take the brain out when [an athlete] is dead," Julian Bailes, a neurosurgeon and director of the Brain Injury Research Institute, told CNN. "At that point there is no solution, no answer."

So a study co-authored by Bailes suggesting that PET scans … Read more

The Notre Dame Fighting Irish football program was the first to win 11 national championships and the first to win seven Heisman Trophies. Now, it'll be among the first to try out a new protective mouthguard that records and reports impact data to help battle concussions.

Pro and college football are much more concerned with head injuries than they were even five years ago, with more data supporting the theory that multiple concussions--even in youth--can lead to long-term depression, permanent memory problems, and dementia later in life.

The "intelligent mouthguard" by Seattle's X2IMPACT records the g-force … Read more

Most of us don't have to worry about getting a concussion on a daily basis. But plenty do (think hockey and football players, infantrymen, etc.), and without quick diagnosis, can risk long-term brain damage if they go back into the field too soon.

A new screening method developed at the Georgia Tech Research Institute could make fast and easy diagnosis, right on the sidelines, far more common. The technique, which examines a person's cognitive and motor skills at the same time, will be presented this week at the SPIE Defense, Security and Sensing conference in Orlando, Fla.

Using a simple radar system--the kind police use to measure the speed of vehicles--the researchers found that they were able to pick up on differences between normal walking patterns and those impaired by alcohol, which has been found to have a similar effect on walking as concussion impairment.

To be clear, this preliminary study is just that, preliminary, with a sample size too small to offer information that is more than anecdotal. But the findings have given the researchers enough data to want to test their approach further.… Read more