<p>This sad story speaks to the danger of a second concussion is suffered (too) soon after the first. The second concussion can result from a much lesser impact than the first, immediate symptoms may be considerably milder, but can turn fatal.</p>
<p>There’s no way of my knowing that this is what happened here, but a key issue is that student athletes often downplay their symptoms and are cleared to resume play before they should be. There are “sideline” tests, some more sophisticated than others, that trainers use on the field and there are “baseline” behavioral tests that some athletic departments are collecting for each athlete. However, neither can determine how a kid “feels” and what subtle symptoms he or she might have if they don’t want it known. The objective measures as well as those used by neurologists may indicate that a student is ready to return to practice or play, but there is no way to tell if the student is minimizing his symptoms or answering the health care professional’s questions 100% honestly.</p>
<p>I guess my message here is to browbeat your kids about how it’s more important to protect their brains than to play in the next game. As a parent, and as a parent who loves to watch my kids and their friends play, my heart goes out to the Doughertys.</p>
<p>You should add the words “football players” to your title. Husband and I always disagreed over concussions. S suffered one 2 years ago. I told him if it happens again, he’s finished with football. S admitted he would blank-out on friends’ names, even weeks after the concussion. H seems to think that the number doesn’t matter, as long as you fully recover between them so would never agree to quitting after the 2nd. After S’s final hs game, I was never so happy to be finished with a sport. One concussion did enough damage.</p>
<p>But yes, I was always glad my boys were too small to play football. However, S2 played soccer, and I used to worry about all the headers for the same reason. Not that severe, taken individually, but repeatedly banging his head like that…</p>
<p>A good friend of mine was an amazing soccer player. Shortly after she got the UNC Morehead Scholarship, she got back-to-back concussions, ending her soccer career and making finishing her rigorous, AP-riddled senior year schedule incredibly difficult. We’d flank her in the halls for months afterwards, protecting her head, keeping her from walking into walls, and yelling at her if she did something reckless. Her teachers were incredibly supportive and helped her ramp back into her academic requirements. She recovered and is doing great today, happily married and in her final year of med school, but I’ll never forget how terrifying it was to know that one more head bonk would be a life or death issue for her that year.</p>
<p>My mother-in-law forbade her sons from playing hockey or football. Competitive boys that they were, they went in for soccer. My husband ended up getting his concussion playing Australian-rules football with his buddies in soccer practice one day. If we have sons, I’m going to have to watch them like hawks… Scary stuff, concussions.</p>
<p>The exact same thing (as in the OP’s article) happend last month at my neice’s h.s in NC.
The player was hit in practice on a Wed. The trainers checked him out and called his mother to come pick him up. The kid returned to school and practice on Thurs. saying he felt fine and passed all neuro tests the trainers did to check hs condition. He was re-checked before the game the next night and passed all tests. He was hit in the head on a play, went to the sidelines, collapsed and was rushed to the hosp. He died the next day when his family removed him from the life support system. </p>
<p>The news said that neither impact would have been enough to kill him separately but the combination of the two so close together was lethal. </p>
<p>The school’s athletic trainer has been suspended peding further investigation.</p>
<p>S2 played football for 7 years (starting in mid. sch). During his jr. season the trainer called us after a game to come pick him up (she didn’t think he should drive home alone) because he had taken a hard hit in the first qtr. of the game but didn’t tell anybody and played the whole game and had a really bad headache afterwards. He saw a sports med. Dr. the next day who said S2 passed all neuro tests and seemed fine. S2 went back to prac. on Monday. I cringe now to think what could have happened to him. </p>
<p>I loved every minute of watching him play football. They were truly some of the happiest and most memorable times of his high sch. career. He learned a lot from football but I did breath a big sigh of relief when his final game was played.<br>
He received letters of interest from college coaches but decided his football career was over and he was ready to be a reg. college student…what a relief.</p>
<p>Oh my gosh, Binx, I didn’t realize that. Just shows you where my head is at!</p>
<p>My kids played football, lacrosse, soccer, basketball and ski raced. All sports where contact is/can be made. Whenever a kid headed the ball in a soccer game, one of my friends used to say, “There go 10 SAT points.” Not totally a joke.</p>
<p>At our h.s. all athletes are required to take a base-line test on the computer before competing in a sport. Doesn’t seem to be too necessary for my son the volleyball player or swimmer, but a good friend who plays soccer was not allowed back after an injury until he had done the follow-up test to compare his post-concussion score with his base test. I am not sure if this is a city requirement or if it is just an agreement that they have with the local med school to use our kids as guinea pigs. I watched over my son’s shoulder as he did the test; it was pretty challenging even without a head injury.</p>
<p>My daughter got a concussion playing soccer. I don’t worry so much about heading the ball, but the collisions which take place during the game in competitive soccer. My daughter’s concussion occurred after a mid air collision which sent her to the ground before she had a chance to put her hand down to break her fall.</p>
<p>I noticed some not so subtle disapproval from the coach when I told him my daughter would have to miss three weeks of practice/games after the injury.</p>
<p>What I didn’t know at the time was that a)according to a trainer for one our local professional sports teams, she should have not returned to the field without wearing a protective head piece (looks kind of like a sweatband) for the remainder of the season and b)that there were tests that should have been performed on her prior to resuming play. </p>
<p>We’ve had no other head injuries, but this thread has really got me thinking. My daughter loves soccer; I could see her minimizing her symptoms also in an effort to get back on the field. This is scary!</p>
<p>When I first heard about the sideline and baseline tests I thought they were great. However, some trainers I’ve spoken to feel that they still need work. One of the issues is the effort the athlete puts into the pretest; not enough effort will give an artificially low score to compare posttest (when the athlete is highly motivated to do well) results to. Another is the incidence of false positives; i.e. testing as impaired when not. Another is how much time has elapsed between pre and post testing (there can be normal developmental changes over a 6 month period). Another is the norms that performance is compared to. And there’s still the issue of symptoms the athlete may or may not report.</p>
<p>I think these tests can become a very valuable tool. I did a quick medline search and unfortunately most of the published research is by the developers of one of the tests; I’d like to see more research by impartial parties. And I’d love to know how to address the issue of under-reporting of symptoms by the athlete - none of these tests can detect that.</p>
<p>Yes it is scary - we have to get our kids to realize just how scary.</p>
<p>lotsofquests, you must be in the Pittsburgh area. I know of several boys and girls who suffered concussions and their parents described how poorly they did on those tests after the injury. It is an interesting test of brain function. My middle schooler would not be devious enough to do poorly on the test to start, but then our family has never placed that high a value on excelling in athletics.</p>
<p>Well, that’s pretty scary - I have four sons playing tackle football. They don’t get hurt very often though, growing up in a family with so many boys, they are <em>tough</em> - it’s mostly the other guys getting hurt :-)</p>
<p>Thankfully, our coaches very much put the players’ health and safety above winning. I was concerned last week: one of my sons is a critical player on his varsity team and he was sick - with asthma a real issue. I was very thankful that though he dressed out and went through the plays for the game, the coaches didn’t allow him to run laps, etc or do anything that might aggravate his asthma during practice. Made me feel a lot better about the guys’ overall safety.</p>
<p>“There goes 10 SAT points” reminded me of my brother… He played baseball when he was little, and decided at about age 7 to rebel against his coaches. They would tell him, “Don’t be afraid of the ball! Don’t be afraid of the ball!” After being chewed out for being a shrinking violet yet again, he declared that he could write computer programs a heck of a lot better than he could play baseball, so he felt that being afraid of the ball was a perfectly healthy reaction, and he decided that he would continue to be afraid of the ball and there wasn’t anything anybody could say to make him change his mind.</p>
<p>He still can’t play baseball but he’s doing okay as a PhD candidate in electrical engineering… I’m still not convinced that it was an overdeveloped sense of survival so much as it was a nerdy little cop-out.</p>
<p>airbarr… While my son has no problem going out on the football field, he refused to “take” pitches at home plate. After the first year of “kid-pitch”, he announced there was no way he was letting kids attempt to pitch while he was standing there. Based on many of the pitches I saw, I agreed with him and let him quit. Younger son refuses to play baseball or football. We’re perfectly fine with cross-country running, basketball, and tennis.</p>
<p>There was big news around here a year or two ago, when one of the New England Patriots former players, Ted Johnson, came forward to say that repeated concussions had left him with severe ongoing medical and psychological issues and cost him his marriage. People paid attention at first, but now I think it’s kind of faded into the background, which is a shame.</p>
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<p>DS is a ski racer, like his dad. DH made the kids get ski helmets as children, but he refused to wear one himself. Finally a couple years ago he got one, and he actually likes it - it’s lightweight, not as tight on his head as a knit hat, and it has little vents that he can open if he’s getting warm. DS is being required to buy a new “racing” helmet this year for his college club races, it has to have plastic flaps over the ears. Don’t see how earflaps help, but at least the powers-that-be are watching the helmets!</p>