“You look up and see stars. The sun shining down on you seems extra bright. You’re not really sure what is going on, so you look around for clues around you. You look at the scoreboard, ‘Okay I’m at school.’ You look down at your body and see your padded body, ‘Okay I was playing football.’ You look at the trainer, ‘What the heck just happened?’ She answers, ‘You got hit in the head pretty hard, you might have a concussion.’ That is the first thing that makes sense because your head feels like it is splitting in two.”
This is a real story from an individual who suffered a concussion during a football game. He told me about the confusion he felt, how dizzy he was, and how blinding the light was to look at right after. There are many stories that are just like this one told by many athletes around the world, but not only athletes suffer concussions. The Brain Injury Research Institute (BIRI) says that in the United States there are around 2-4 million concussions every year.
But what is a concussion?
A concussion is described as a biomechanical force to the brain. This causes a potassium efflux, and a sodium and calcium influx. This increase of calcium can lead to neurofilaments collapsing and axons losing their structural integrity leading to axonal dysfunction. There is also glutamate release at times when it is not meant to release, causing excitotoxicity inside of cells. With everything going wacky, ATP is required to bring everything back to normal. This calls for an increased consumption of glucose to provide ATP. This causes your energy stores of glucose to be low after a concussion and you can feel very exhausted from small activities.
Why Don’t We Eliminate Concussions?
http://a1.espncdn.com/combiner/i?img=%2Fphoto%2F2017%2F1026%2Fr280294_1296x729_16%2D9.jpg
Joe Flacco sustained a concussion on this hit from Kiko Alonso in a football game last year.
Since concussions are so prevalent and they can cause lasting and worsening effects of the brain and people’s lives, why don’t we just eliminate them? I believe that the main reason for this is: people care so much about their activities and the possibility of suffering a brain injury is worth it to participate in something they love doing. Just look at sports, according to BIRI 10% of all college football players and 20% of all high school players sustain brain injuries, 87% of professional boxers have sustained a brain injury, 5% of soccer players have sustained brain injuries, and an athlete who sustains a concussion is 4-6 times more likely to sustain a second concussion. In my personal opinion, we need to start looking at concussions more as a serious injury and I believe we have as a society. We need to get more information out there to those who are at risk for suffering concussions and for those who have already suffered concussions. We should be taught that the sport could end up costing you a normal life and that if you need to give it up, you should. Sometimes you need to sacrifice things you love for other things you love, whether that is not playing your sport after sustaining an injury; or a healthy brain. Sometimes love hurts.
Sources:
http://www.protectthebrain.org/Brain-Injury-Research/What-is-a-Concussion-.aspx
https://moodle.cord.edu/pluginfile.php/708078/mod_resource/content/3/2014%20The_New_Neurometabolic_Cascade_of_Concussion.3.pdf
