This week's best of MomsTeam.com, a health and safety website that focuses on youth sports:
- A growing number of U.S. high schools have an athletic trainer on staff, but, given their key role in assessing sports concussions and return to play decisions, every school should have one, argued MomsTeam's Brooke de Lench.
- Teen athletes derive many positive benefits from participating in sports, but their increased risk of sports-related injuries may also heighten their risk for medication misuse and abuse, especially for boys, according to a recent study in the Journal of Adolescent Health.
- The ability of teens, and, in the case of younger athletes, their parents, to accurately recall the severity of symptoms experienced before after a mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI) injury is subject to a "good old days" bias and declines dramatically over time, according to new study by researchers in Calgary, Alberta. The study suggests that using symptom ratings of pre-injury functioning obtained as soon as possible after injury might result in a 5 to 7-fold improvement in a clinician's identification of patients who have clinically recovered from concussion. Nevertheless, experts warn parents to keep in mind that the fact that symptoms have returned to pre-injury baseline does not automatically mean that a child or teen is ready to return to sports, as several recent studies have shown.
- Lower back injuries are the third most common injuries suffered in athletes under age 18, according to a study by Loyola University Medical Center sports medicine physician Neeru Jayanthi, which found that many injuries are severe enough to sideline young athletes for one-to-six months, and put them at future risk for long-term back problems.
- The eyes of the world will soon to be focused on the Winter Olympic Games in Sochi, Russia, but, while it is the dream of every athlete to win a medal for his or her country, the American Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons hopes that the athlete do not develop a "stop-at-nothing mentality to win," which may lead them to use of performance-enhancing drugs (PEDs) to increase performance, endurance, muscle mass and strength. AAOS spokesperson Dr. Edward McDevitt urged physicians, coaches, trainers and parents to use the Olympics as an opportunity to develop open communication with their athletes concerning the pros and cons of PEDs, and provides a list of warning signs of PED use.
-- MomsTeam.com and NFLEvolution.com.