Experts: Student concussion guidelines make sense

There is little hard science showing what happens to a brain that has suffered a sports-related concussion over the long term, but experts said that taking an injured player out of the game and having him evaluated by a doctor makes sense.

"There's considerable interest in the question of how a concussion should be managed and some debate within the medical field on exactly how much brain damage a concussion causes," said Dr. Michael Egnor, vice chairman of the department of neurological surgery at Stony Brook University Medical Center.

Nevertheless, given the growing, if incomplete, evidence, Egnor said the American Academy of Neurology's recommendations that children or adolescents who get a concussion should be evaluated by a doctor and receive medical clearance before returning to the sport makes sense.

"They strike a very reasonable balance," said Dr. Ronald Kanner, chairman of the department of neurology at the North Shore-Long Island Jewish Health System, of the guidelines.

A study in the journal Pediatrics published in September said that anywhere from 300,000 to 3.8 million recreation and sports-related concussions occur each year in the United States.

Concussions represent about 8.9 percent of all high school athletic injuries, the report said. Girls - for unknown reasons - are reported to have a higher rate of concussions than boys in similar sports. That is despite the fact that the sport with the highest risk of concussion in high school is football, a sport dominated by males.

A study in the same issue of Pediatrics found that the number of sports-related concussions in younger athletes is on the rise. Although participation in organized team sports has declined, visits to the emergency room for concussions from 1997 to 2007 in 8- to 13-year-olds doubled. They more than doubled among the 14- to 19-year-olds, the study found.

One often-cited survey in 2009 of more than a 1,000 retired National Football League players by the University of Michigan found that former players reported higher rates of memory loss, dementia or Alzheimer's disease. Former football players ages 30-49 reported 19 percent more memory loss than men their ages; ex-players 50 and older had a 5 percent higher rate than most men their ages, the survey found.