Sports injury genes could change your future.
Imagine this scenario. You try to register for your hockey team as you do every year. But the league has a new policy: All players must report to a health center to get their mouths swabbed. A couple of days later, you get a call. “You’re positive for ApoE4. We’re sorry, but because of liability rules, you can’t play in this league. In fact, you shouldn’t play hockey anywhere.” Continue reading Do Sports Injury Genes Determine Your Fitness?
California took a step forward yesterday when Gov. Jerry Brown signed a law limiting contact in American tackle football practices. One provision of the law could affect soccer, hockey and other contact sports as well as football. But it doesn’t go far enough.
California’s new law restricts full contact in high school and middle school tackle football practices to two sessions of 90 minutes each per week during the season. It prohibits these practices off season.
It also requires that any high-school or middle-school athlete (not just a football player) “suspected of sustaining a concussion or head injury” be removed from play until evaluated by a healthcare professional. Continue reading California’s New Sports Concussion Law Doesn’t Go Far Enough
I used to love tackle football. Big for my age, I enjoyed the collision with other bodies. I never played on a team, just with a bunch of high school friends. We had no helmets or pads. We couldn’t hit each other too hard, or we’d get hurt ourselves, and we certainly never used our heads as weapons.
I wonder what would be the incidence of concussion now if that’s how people played competitive football. Studies in rugby have generally shown that helmets don’t prevent concussion in that sport.
The research on concussions is pretty mixed as it is. I covered an interesting study on this for Medscape and Healthline when I was in New Orleans in March for the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons Annual meeting. Gregory W. Stewart, chief of physical medicine and rehabilitation at Tulane University School of Medicine told me high school football players he studied didn’t seem to be sustaining serious injuries.
Tracking 1,289 Louisiana high school football players from 1997 to 2000, he and his colleagues found that the more time the teenagers spent on the field, the better they did on tests of their mental abilities.
The finding contradicts earlier reports of brain damage in football players at all levels of the sport. “The concussive forces may not be quite as bad as we think,” he said. Continue reading How We Can Stop Football Concussions
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