In what seems to be an eternity ago, I wrote about a pair of studies on concussions for Scientific American. The 2013 piece was interesting to write because it covered two studies whose combined findings revealed as much about the gaps in concussion research as they did clinically useful findings. A few years after that, […]
Doctors and researchers are adapting treatments for brain injuries to recognize individuals’ needs, but still are searching for the right balance of care for a diverse set of patients who have suffered blows to the head, panelists told attendees at one panel during Health Journalism 2018 in Phoenix. Treating people with possible concussions means providers […]
Conversations about concussions, traumatic brain injury and chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) have become more common in recent years as many military veterans return with disabling head injuries and the impact of football injuries on the brain gets more scrutiny in medical research. The recent movie “Concussion,” starring Will Smith, raised even more awareness of the […]
The Tennesean‘s Nate Rau becomes the leader in the clubhouse for 2012’s “most viscerally disquieting use of a verb” award after opening his youth sports concussions story with “The hit that sloshed 17-year-old Joseph Lascara’s brain.” The entire anecdote, much like the hit it describes, is well-timed and jarring, and Rau then follows through with […]
Writing for Sports Illustrated, David Epstein tells the story of a small-scale Indiana football concussion study in which in which the youth in the control group unexpectedly became the headliners. The researchers were using functional MRIs and the popular ImPACT test, along with helmet-mounted accelerometers, to figure out what sort of hits cause concussions and […]
The New York Times‘ Alan Schwarz reports on what he says is “the first firm pathological indications that brain trauma results in motor-neuron degeneration.” The headline behind that conclusion, of course, is that researchers say some athletes with concussion and impact-induced brain injuries may have been misdiagnosed as ALS victims. Photo by peterjr1961 via Flickr […]