This week's best links from MomsTeam.com, a website devoted to health and safety issues in youth sports:
- Because young children are physically, cognitively and emotionally different from adults, a different set of tools need to be developed and used for the diagnosis, recovery-assessment and management of their concussions, recommends a new study. Given the importance of school, the "primary endpoint" should be "return to learn, not return to play," according the authors of a literature review published in the British Journal of Medicine.
- Previous concussions and match play are all but certain to increase the risk of sports-related concussions, but the jury is still out on whether other factors, such as sex, playing position, playing level, style of play, environment and injury mechanism, also increase concussion risk, according to the authors of a first-of-its-kind, evidence-based systematic review of the scientific literature published in the British Journal of Medicine.
- Preliminary data from a pilot study of retired professional English soccer players has found that, once their playing careers end, the chronic low-level head trauma they sustained from repetitive heading does not put them at greater risk of long-term cognitive decline than the general population. But the study, published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, is already being criticized as methodologically flawed, and is likely to only add fuel to the fire of a 30-year debate about the long-term effect of heading in soccer.
- Despite increased helmet use, a recent study in the journal Injury Prevention reports that the number of snow-sports-related traumatic brain injuries (TBIs) keeps rising. It's prompting calls by experts to implement a variety of targeted prevention strategies, with a special focus on educating parents about the protective value of helmets and the role modeling effect the parent's use has on their child's decision to wear a helmet, which a study in the Clinical Journal of Sport Medicine found dramatically increases the odds of helmet use.
- A recent study in the journal Pediatrics reports that sledding-related injuries are common among children and adolescents during the winter, but many are preventable if common sense safety precautions, including the use of helmets, are taken, according to researchers at Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio.
-- MomsTeam.com and NFLEvolution.com
