Like many other students at Concordia College, I am (was) a student athlete. I wrestled for three years at Concordia, and I wrestled all the way from high school back to kindergarten. Only my senior year did I decide that enough was enough and it was time to hang up the wrestling shoes. And yet I feel guilty despite all the time and energy I spent cultivating my skills. My reasoning for quitting was that it was time to give my brain a break.
Nearly a year ago today I was wrestling with a teammate. It was the off season, so we were just messing around. My partner took a low shot, which I blocked with my knee. We had gone through this motion probably a thousand times before, but this time the knee cap to his temple knocked him out. He was fine, but he was unconscious for a few moments.
Instances like my wrestling practice are all too common in American colleges and high schools. Our obsession with sports is often chalked up to their ability to help young people develop character traits like tenacity and team working cohesiveness. But what’s the catch?
Our Concordia College neurochemistry class reviewed whats happening to our brain cells following a concussion, and there’s five things happening on a molecular level that you should know about.
- Ionic Flux- After that big hit, your brain cells are reeling, and the ions (sodium, potassium, and calcium) are flying all over the place. Lots of positive ions move out of the cells, and they can’t signal anymore. This doesn’t allow the brain to communicate effectively.
- Energy crisis- Dealing with an injury takes a lot of energy. When the ions start moving around, your brain cells try to move them back against their gradient. This takes up a ton of energy, and the brain cells end up exhausting their energy stores rather quickly. In turn, your brain cells are subjected to metabolic stress, which is not a good thing.
- Cytoskeletal damage- If your brain cells were a building, and you threw those buildings against a wall really really hard, you’d expect there to be some damage right? This also happens to your brain cells during a concussion. The mechanical support system that holds your cells together (called the cytoskeleton) can break apart from the force of the hit.
- Axonal damage- Axons relay signals between brain cells, and they look like a long bridge projecting from the cells. Unfortunately these long bridges are also prone to breaking just like the cytoskeleton. Cells with broken axons tend to shrink and/or die.
- Protease dysfunction- Proteases are the small molecules that recycle proteins. To do this however, the protease needs energy. Remember the energy crisis that’s going on in your brain? Well if we don’t have the energy to keep your cells alive, we probably won’t be breaking down any proteins. This results in the accumulation of proteins within cells. This isn’t a big deal in younger brains normally, but as we age this can cause problems.
Even with all this evidence that hitting each other with our heads is bad for us (duh) we continue to engage in sports that consistently cause concussions. After thinking about this, I think I would still wrestle even if I knew it I would get a concussion. I believe that it’s easy for people to glaze over the life lessons we can take away from sports, but I definitely would not be going to medical school without having wrestled first. Wrestling taught me to stay on task and keep grinding even when things aren’t going well. I likely would have given up on my dream of being a physician without sports, so the brain trauma was worth it for me. But I think it is important to educate younger people about the risks involved in contact sports, so they can decide for themselves.
