Concussive Study Yields Disturbing, Enlightening Results

Rochester Professor Finds Cumulative Effect of Football Collisions

A study by Jianhui Zhong, a professor of imaging sciences and physics at the University of Rochester, has produced surprising as well as disturbing outcomes.  A football player on the Rochester team, Jeff Bazarian, had experienced a mild concussion and Zhong thought that a test his department was using for other purposes called the Diffusion Tensor Imaging exam might shed some light on how concussions affected players.  Using a 10 other players at various positions as his control group, what resulted took the professor aback. 

According to his findings, the ten other players who all participated in routine football activities such as interior linemen firing off the line of scrimmage into opposing players and running backs being jostled while running the football showed signs of brain damage equal to what Bazarian suffered, but without the same symptoms.  The difference was that Bazarian had exhibited the standard indicator of a concussion, blurred vision, which physicians depend upon to signal that a concussion has occurred. 

In an article written by the NCAA’s Brian Hendrickson on ncaa.org, the Rochester study “suggested the hits players endured play-to-play and week-to-week could accumulate and affect the brain’s health.  Imagine linemen colliding, a running back getting bumped while powering through a hole, or linebackers finishing off a play. Those plays – the bedrock of game action – could be adversely affecting a player’s health over time.”

This, of course, points to a cumulative effect and will most certainly alter the way physicians view football-related head injuries. We can anticipate pre- and post-season skull and brain imaging to be a part of the head trauma examination process, especially for professional if not college and high school football athletes.

Someone, somewhere will take this study and expand on it to learn more about how the frequency of collisions are impacting players over a single game, a season and over a career. Moreover, the Rochester results will certainly push helmet manufacturers back to the drawing board in an attempt to deliver headgear which will further protect players.  The study’s news is, in the end, a good news bad news scenario, but in the larger scheme if it will create an even greater emphasis on safety, everyone wins.