New Research Helping Protect Football Players From Serious Head Injuries
Researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have just published their findings indicating some of the hardest hits for football players come from seemingly light impacts. They studied UNC football players over a two year period by embedding tiny sensors in the players' helmets to record g-force data.
UNC researcher Jason Mihalik said, "As the players get hit - what it's telling us is how hard they are getting hit, the magnitude of that impact, the location of the impact and duration of the impact."
The research also found that hits to the top of a players head may be more dangerous than other impacts, but symptoms are often the same.
"People see massive hits and think, ‘that's the one!' and ignore more trivial blows," said Kevin Guskiewicz, senior author on the papers and chair of the department of exercise and sport science in UNC's College of Arts and Sciences. "Now we know that these trivial hits may be just as serious as the harder ones."
This new information could lead to better guidelines for evaluating head injuries and deciding a player's playing status, Guskiewicz said. It might also lead to a better understanding of brain injuries from other trauma, or perhaps of diseases such as mild cognitive impairment and Alzheimer's which have been linked to recurrent concussion in professional players.
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