2nd Euro Sports Medicine-Fitness and Physiotherapy Jul 20-21, 2020 London, UK

Repetitive impacts key to understanding sports-associated concussions

Scientists have made a significant advance in our understanding of mild head trauma (concussive brain injury) and how it may be managed and treated in the future. It seems that repetitive impacts -- as opposed to single events -- cause the all-important damage to blood vessels in the brain. These repetitive impacts can be visualized via an MRI signal.

Mild head trauma has come to the fore in recent years as being associated with collision and combat sports. However, it is also a very common injury in children and young adults and represents a significant challenge to physicians due to the lack of any robust biomarkers or objective imaging approaches to manage the injury.

"This was a hypothesis-driven project whereby we challenged the hypothesis that repetitive head trauma would induce damage to small blood vessels in the brain that we would then be able to image with a novel form of MRI-based brain scans," said Dr Matthew Campbell, Assistant Professor at Trinity.

The study, which was undertaken by the Trinity-led Concussion Research Interest Group (CRIG) used both sensor-enabled mouthguard technology developed by the group of Professor David Camarillo at Stanford University and dynamic contrast-enhanced MRI to confirm the number and severity of head impacts that would lead to the appearance of "leaky" blood vessels within the brain.

Participants of combat and collision sports such as mixed martial arts (MMA) and rugby took part in the clinical research study, which took four years to complete and is part of a wider longitudinal study, which is still ongoing.

.2nd Euro Sports Medicine-Fitness and Physiotherapy

“Exploring the Advancements in Sports Med and Physiotherapy ”Jul 20-21, 2020 London, UK