A new study found that even mild but repetitive blows on the head may affect a person’s memory and thinking capacities.
Researchers from the Indiana University School of Medicine led by former professional footballer Tom McAllister conducted the study using advanced helmets to monitor football and ice hockey players during their game seasons. All of the contact players did not have any concussions during the research period.
Concussions are noncritical brain injuries which are usually caused by a sudden impact on the head or body. The normal symptoms that a patient experiences are headaches, blurred eyesight, and insomnia. Sometimes they also have trouble with their memory and thinking capacities.
The specialized helmets were designed to gather and monitor significant data such as when mild blows are taken by the players during their games. Dr. Tom McAllister told Philly.com, "The accelerometers in the helmets allowed us to count and quantify the intensity and frequency of impacts. We thought it might result in some interesting insights."
The participants include 80 players in football and ice hockey and 79 noncontact sports varsity teams in Dartmouth College. Each of the concussion-free players used special helmets for the researchers to gather enough data to evaluate their brain activities before and after the game season.
After analyzing the results of the memory and learning assessments, they found that 20 percent of the contact sport players and 11 percent of the noncontact players did poorly. This was a big drop from the expected seven percent from the sample population, according to McAllister.
Those who did worse in the assessments had remarkable increase in corpus callosum activities in the brain. The corpus callosum is a group of nerves that connect the left side of the brain with the right.
Aside from this, the team also discovered that the level of change in the white matter inside the brain – the white matter which transmits messages to and from different parts of the brain – is higher than those who did poorly in the memory and learning assessments.
Dr. McAllister said, "This suggests that concussion is not the only thing we need to pay attention to. These athletes didn't have a concussion diagnosis in the year we studied them ... and there is a subsample of them who are perhaps more vulnerable to impact. We need to learn more about how long these changes last and whether the changes are permanent."
The study was published in the December 11 issue of Neurology.
