>> My role in the NFL Brain and Spinal Cord Injury Prevention Committee is I chair the
subcommittee that's developing the clinical research database and we hope to collect a
great deal of information to help better understand concussions and better understand what we
can do to make this work safely. So, we're going to try to be collecting things like
genetic profiling of players having helmets that are equipped with accelerometers so we
can look at the forces that apply to the head through practice sessions or games and then
correlate those forces with type of play, weather conditions, field surface, a lot of
different data that we could put in and analyze. For instance, we might find that someone with
a particular genetic profile, there are some genes that seem to predispose to Alzheimer's
disease later on. That person with that genetic profile playing a particular position would
be at extraordinarily high risk for developing late life cognitive decline. In that case,
it would be very valuable to those players to know that they had that kind of genetic
profile before, you know, deciding whether or not to go into that field of activity.
We'd also like to be able to look at a whole range of data and see if there's anything
that could be modified in regards to equipment playing surface, et cetera that would reduce
the risk of long-term neurological injury. There is a consensus panel in Zurich a couple
of years ago that looked at all the available data with the question of what would be the
best approach for returning athletes to play after a concussion and the consensus of that
panel was that it be should be a graduated return to play over a longer period of time.
10 years ago, if a person had a concussion as soon as that person was symptom free, they
would often be put back into the game, maybe even in the same day and athletes notoriously
deny symptoms. The new guidelines suggest that there should be a period of both physical
and cognitive rest and then a gradual increase to return to play even in asymptomatic patients
that takes about a week so that people would be out of contact sports for a week. If they
then were asymptomatic, they could return to play. The concern is the athletes are motivated
to play. They wanna get back in the game. Coaches are motivated to get particularly
their best athletes back in the game. But the guideline serves as a way of reducing
the risk of long-term neurological injury by returning to play too quickly. So, I think
that the idea of a graduated return to play makes sense based on what we know about the
neurology, neuropathology, neuroscience associated with this and it's certainly, from the standpoint
of a parent, is the more appropriate way to get athletes back into the game. You know,
I'm a parent. I have faced that and I'm facing that. I encourage my children to participate
in sports including contact sport. I think there is a great value in that but I think
that we need do everything we can to make them safe as possible including better understanding
of, you know, what might lead to long-term neurological problems, the best equipment
possible and safe return to play practices. So my advice would be, don't avoid all contact
sports, encourage your children to be active in those if it's something that they enjoy.
But, you know, we need to be careful in evaluating particularly students who get a concussion
and make sure--making sure that they don't return to play too soon.