Monday October 2, 2023
Concussions are one of the most common injuries in Sports Medicine, and over 300,000 sports related brain injuries occur in athletes in the United States every year. This week in ISM I wanted to focus my research on Concussions because it is such a common and significant injury. If athletes get a concussion but don't recover fully before returning to play and then get a second blow to the head it could be fatal for them. This was very interesting piece of information I learned. As a result I realized it is extremely important for physicians to diagnose and treat the concussions immediately.
The most interesting thing I learned was that after a concussion the athletes can have two different types of amnesia. One type occurs when the athlete can't remember the events prior to the injury, and another one occurs when they can't remember the events after the injury either. This was really interesting to me because I didn't know athletes couldn't remember the events after the injury either. That is kind of scary because its hard to know how long that amnesia lasts (some are less than 5 minutes while some last longer than a couple days). It also was impactful when I learned that most physicians ask the patients "Do you remember being evaluated after your injury?" and many say no.
Overall concussions come in different forms, levels of severity, and have different lasting impacts. However, I recognized that all are equally as important to treat immediately. I did not expect to be so fascinated with concussions but it was a really interesting topic to research. It was really cool to learn about the different injuries in the brain and how different they are from knee and arm injuries which are some I have researched so far.
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