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Head Injuries In Sports

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In America, football fans have declared their sport the national religion. This could be true with hundreds of thousands of fans going to games and millions more watching on television every Sunday. It is more than a game for some fan but it is more a game for the players. To keep up with growing fan base, football has become more competitive with larger, faster and stronger players. Although this allows for greater entertainment with bigger hits and more spectacular plays, the reality is it all comes at a price. Parents place their kids in football at younger and younger ages. As a result the exposure allows for better football players in the future but it also means more and more children are subject to greater risk of head injuries. The …show more content…
As a very physical sport, football comes along with injuries. The National Collegiate Athletic Association reported 41 000 football injuries from 2004-2009. 7.4% of those injuries were concussions (NCAA, n.d.). This high injury rate is well known in the football community. Most high level teams have injury reports daily or weekly. After a study done by the Journal of Athletics Training, using accelerometers, results revealed that a player can receive up to 1400 head impacts per season (Crisco, 2010). In additions the number of head in impacts per game is around three times then head impacts per practice (Crisco, 2010; NCAA, n.d.). For many years, studies were avoided to determine the impact of the high number of head collisions. Some skeptics argued head impacts had meager residual effects. In recent years, the Journal of the American Academy of Neurology assessed NCAA athletes who were in non-contact sports and compared the results with those who played the highest division of football. The results found “ a higher percentage of contact sport athletes performed more poorly than predicted on a measure of learning [test] compared to the non-contact athletes” (McAllister, 2012). The …show more content…
Many retired players are only now just feeling the effects of their head impacts. Only recently, doctors have tested deiced football players who exhibited abnormal mental behavior. These tests revealed a new disease – chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE). In fact, 87 out of 91 former NFL players tested positive for CTE (Breslow, 2015; The New York Times, 2015). The most scary part of CTE is that there is no way to properly diagnosis or treat it. Current brain scanning technology is not advance enough to determine more than a mild head injury (Mayo Clinic, 2014). This is little comfort to those who have lost their lives to this disease or for those who are living with it right now. With many side effects, such as decline in memory and cognition, depression, aggression, impulsiveness, suicidal behavior, parkinson and dementia, athletics living with CTE fighting an unwinnable battle everyday (Stern, 2011). In the past, the National Football league would try to cover up these injuries and provide athletes with ‘medication’ so they would not publicly announce the likely cause of their injuries. Ill athletes often took a plethora of drugs to help function on a daily basis. These drugs would either make things better on the outside but worse the brain on the inside or would diminish the quality of life for the athletes. Both of those paths lead to addiction and the worsened residual effects. Many athletes lost their families,

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