How concussions and collisions change your brain

  Inspired by Dr. Jennifer Krizman’s findings about how concussions affect the auditory system, I wanted to look into other research regarding concussions and concussion prevention. Dr. Krizman’s research studied college athletes who have experienced concussions while playing their sport. What they found is that concussions cause lasting impairment to athletes’ auditory systems, and lead to diminished recognition of the fundamental frequency. This deficit can cause issues with speech recognition and auditory processing. 

A TIME article titled “Football Can Damage the Brains of High-School Players” (https://time.com/6691587/is-football-safe-for-high-school-players/) sheds more light on just how damaging concussions can be for students’ neurological development. The article focuses on research done by Dr. Keisuke Kawata comparing the brains of non-contact high school athletes vs high school football players.

What they found is that high school football players had increased sulcal depth in a variety of brain regions, which creates the “water-hammer effect”: pooling of spinal fluid in these sulcal pits lead to increased damage to surrounding tissues when the head is hit hard. Not only were the sulcal pits deeper, but the tissues in the gyri surrounding them were higher. According to a 2016 study referenced by the researchers, these higher peaks could indicate compensation for other impaired brain regions. They also found significant thinning in the cerebral cortex, which is only usually seen in people 30 to 40 years older than these students. The researchers also mention a 2019 paper which shows a link between these neurological changes and major depressive disorder. This aligns with symptoms of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), which is characterized by changes in behavior, including suicidality. The discovery of CTE is relatively recent, because the symptoms are diverse and it can only be conclusively diagnosed postmortem. As more former football players have begun to pass away, CTE has begun to be found more and more in their autopsies. Dr. Kawata’s study sheds more light on how it could be starting to develop at a very young age.

In combination with Dr. Krizman’s work, it’s clear that concussions can cause damage to many areas of the brain, and have widespread effects that aren’t fully understood. While concussion symptoms go away and players are often cleared to continue playing afterward, the neurological effects of concussions are permanent. It’s important that we do more to protect the neurological health of our young athletes by doing more research into concussion prevention and recovery. Additionally, raising awareness of CTE and other neurological damage caused by traumatic brain injury could help a push to make football and other collision sports safer.