Sports Illustrated’s latest issue brings news that head injuries don’t have to rise to the concussive level to cause brain damage. Purdue researchers have shown that the smaller, more frequent hits can actually do more damage than a concussion.
The mounting evidence suggests that some people—perhaps a lot—simply cannot play these games without being damaged, concussion or no concussion. “You can break something by hitting it hard once,” says Katie Morigaki, a Purdue graduate assistant athletic trainer who worked on the study, “or you can break it by hitting it softer many times.”
If the test scores were accurate, the researchers had inadvertently documented, in real time, a new classification of high school athlete: a player who was never concussed, was not verbally impaired and was asymptomatic even as far as his parents could tell, but whose visual memory was more impaired than his amnesic, headachy, light-sensitive, concussed teammates.
After reading this last night I woke up worried about how doomed I am with all the hits my head has taken, not from football but from falling out of bed as a kid, banging my head against the wall (also as a kid), and other misadventures. I’m not letting my kids play football, that’s for sure. The fewer brain-damaged members of the family, the better!
