Study finds head impacts in contact sports may reduce learning in college athletes
A new study suggests that head impacts experienced during contact sports such as football and hockey may worsen some college athletes' ability to acquire new information. The research is published in the May 16, 2012, online issue of Neurology, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology.
The study involved college athletes at three Division I schools and compared 214 athletes in contact sports to 45 athletes in non-contact sports such as track, crew and Nordic skiing at the beginning and at the end of their seasons. The contact sport athletes wore special helmets that recorded the acceleration speed and other data at the time of any head impact.
The contact sport athletes experienced an average of 469 head impacts during the season. Athletes were not included in the study if they were diagnosed with a concussion during the season.
All of the athletes took tests of thinking and memory skills before and after the season. A total of 45 contact sport athletes and 55 non-contact sport athletes from one of the schools also took an additional set of tests of concentration, working memory and other skills.
"The good news is that overall there were few differences in the test results between the athletes in contact sports and the athletes in non-contact sports," said study author Thomas W. McAllister, MD, of The Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth in Lebanon, N.H. "But we did find that a higher percentage of the contact sport athletes had lower scores than would have been predicted after the season on a measure of new learning than the non-contact sport athletes."
A total of 22 percent of the contact sport athletes performed worse than expected on the test of new learning, compared to four percent of the non-contact sport athletes.
McAllister noted that the study did not find differences in test results between the two groups of athletes at the beginning of the season, suggesting that the cumulative head impacts that contact athletes had incurred over many previous seasons did not result in reduced thinking and memory skills in the overall group.
"These results are somewhat reassuring, given the recent heightened concern about the potential negative effects of these sports," he said. "Nevertheless, the findings do suggest that repetitive head impacts may have a negative effect on some athletes."
McAllister said it's possible that some people may be genetically more sensitive to head impacts.
Journal reference:
Neurology
Provided by
American Academy of Neurology
-
Concussed high school athletes who receive neuropsychological testing sidelined longer
Dec 15, 2010 |
not rated yet |
0
-
Former football players prone to late-life health problems, study finds
Nov 09, 2011 |
not rated yet |
0
-
Female and younger athletes take longer to overcome concussions
May 08, 2012 |
not rated yet |
0
-
Kids who specialize in one sport may have higher injury risk
May 02, 2011 |
not rated yet |
0
-
Think twice before knee surgery, study warns
Mar 27, 2012 |
not rated yet |
0
-
Motion perception revisited: High Phi effect challenges established motion perception assumptions
Apr 23, 2013 |
3 / 5 (2) |
2
-
Anything you can do I can do better: Neuromolecular foundations of the superiority illusion (Update)
Apr 02, 2013 |
4.5 / 5 (11) |
5
-
The visual system as economist: Neural resource allocation in visual adaptation
Mar 30, 2013 |
5 / 5 (2) |
9
-
Separate lives: Neuronal and organismal lifespans decoupled
Mar 27, 2013 |
4.9 / 5 (8) |
0
-
Sizing things up: The evolutionary neurobiology of scale invariance
Feb 28, 2013 |
4.8 / 5 (10) |
14
-
Why is zone 1 in liver more prone to ischemic injury?
May 23, 2013
-
How can there be villous adenoma in colon, if there are no villi there
May 22, 2013
-
How can there be a term called "intestinal metaplasia" of stomach
May 21, 2013
-
Pressure-volume curve: Elastic Recoil Pressure don't make sense
May 18, 2013
-
If you became brain-dead, would you want them to pull the plug?
May 17, 2013
-
MRI bill question
May 15, 2013
- More from Physics Forums - Medical Sciences
More news stories
New neuron formation could increase capacity for new learning, at the expense of old memories
New research presented today shows that formation of new neurons in the hippocampus - a brain region known for its importance in learning and remembering - could cause forgetting of old memories by causing a reorganization ...
Neuroscience
2 hours ago |
5 / 5 (1) |
0
Help at hand for people with schizophrenia
How can healthy people who hear voices help schizophrenics? Finding the answer for this is at the centre of research conducted at the University of Bergen.
Neuroscience
2 hours ago |
3 / 5 (1) |
2
Japanese research organizations contribute to Human Brain Project
One of the major frontiers of modern science is a comprehensive understanding of the human brain and its functions to guide the development of new technologies in information and communication. In a major announcement for ...
Neuroscience
3 hours ago |
not rated yet |
0
Controlling mood through the motions of mitochondria
(Medical Xpress)—Regulating the distribution of power in neurons is done by a system that makes the national electric grid look simple by comparison. Each neuron has several thousand mitochondria confined ...
Neuroscience
18 hours ago |
4.9 / 5 (9) |
0
|
Brain uses internal 'average voice' prototype to identify who is talking
(Medical Xpress)—The human brain is able to identify individuals' voices by comparing them against an internal 'average voice' prototype, according to neuroscientists.
Neuroscience
22 hours ago |
3 / 5 (2) |
2
|
Going live: Immune cell activation in multiple sclerosis
Biological processes are generally based on events at the molecular and cellular level. To understand what happens in the course of infections, diseases or normal bodily functions, scientists would need to ...
Youth with type 2 diabetes at much higher risk for heart, kidney disease
The news about youth and diabetes keeps getting worse. The latest data from the national TODAY diabetes study shows that children who develop Type 2 diabetes are at high risk to develop heart, kidney and eye problems faster ...
New animal model gives insights into mechanisms of Parkinson's disease pathogenesis
In Parkinson's disease, the protein "alpha-synuclein" aggregates and accumulates within neurons. Specific areas of the brain become progressively affected as the disease develops and advances. The mechanism underlying this ...
Audiologists recommend smart phone apps to monitor noise levels
After studying noise in one French Quarter neighborhood of New Orleans to determine whether or not noise levels exceeded municipal ordinances, Annette Hurley, PhD, Assistant Professor of Audiology at LSU Health Sciences Center ...
Registry confirms TAVI efficacy and safety in Asian patients
Transcatheter aortic valve implantation (TAVI) is effective and safe in Asian patients, according to early experience based on first results from a multicentre Asian registry reported at EuroPCR 2013.
Young children who miss well-child visits are more likely to be hospitalized
Young children who missed more than half of recommended well-child visits had up to twice the risk of hospitalization compared to children who attended most of their visits, according to a study published today in the American Jo ...