Sports are an essential part of growth and mental development. As technology has increased, institutions and parents want their children to be physically active and, therefore, enrol them in different sports-related activities. A common problem during sports activities is athletic injuries. Several programs have focused on sports injury prevention and campaigns for athletes, young patients, coaches, and physicians to detect and manage injuries.
Athletic Injury Impact on the Brain
When a blow or impact causes the brain to shift inside the skull, nerve tissue is damaged. This damage creates a cascade of molecular changes that alter nerve cells’ running. When a concussion occurs, the brain’s chemical balance changes abruptly.
Under normal circumstances, brain cells expend a lot of energy to maintain the ions (charged particles) inside and outside their membranes and to keep the electric condition stable. After a concussion, however, research based mainly on animals finds an immediate loss of potassium and glutamate from within cells without all that calcium pouring inside them.
The minute the injury occurs, the concentration of potassium outside cells can rise massively, reaching levels as high as five times usual. This peak in potassium concentration tends to tumble back to baseline within 2.5 minutes following a mild injury or, if the injury was worse than that, within six minutes instead. In a similar pattern following the injury, glutamate levels also rise in the brain.
In humans, so far, at least violent injuries and more gentle ones– while the former can be measured with specialized tools and the latter by sophisticated scanning techniques. For instance, when subjected to a concussive blow, athletes will show a decline in locomotor cortex brain chemical (NAA). Concussion disrupts the average chemical balance of the brain almost immediately after the injury, changing brain cell function and producing symptoms.
Work on Sport Injury
The Institute of Medicine and National Research Council, with the support of several government and non-profit organizations, called together a specialized group to examine the science behind concussive athletic injuries resulting from sports in children, adolescents, and armed forces and their families. The committee proposed measures that every group could take, including the research funders, legislators, state and school superintendents, and athletic directors. However, several unanswered questions still need to be discovered.
Changing The Culture
In sports, we have seen that an athlete’s teammates, coach, or parent may try to push him into play when they know they don’t want to be a part of it. This is known as the Second Impact Syndrome risk, which directly impacting peace of mind.
Service personnel are brought into a culture that includes duty before self. There have been many sports injury treatments where the player is not allowed to play until he or she is fully recovered. However, concussions are still not taken seriously. Youth sports entities should accept that concussions are one of the very serious athletic injuries. The team or coach should care for those players with it until they are fully recovered. This becomes our challenge for the future.
Statistics
Stanford statistics explain that 30 million children in the USA play sports. They also report that 3.5 million suffer from athletic injuries, the most common of which are sprains and strains, for which they get sports injury treatment.
However, the intensity of injury is different for every sport. Support that have high physical contact have higher chances of injuries.
Sports activities contribute to 21% of TBI among children. More than 775,000 children, ages 14 and younger go for sports injury treatment in hospital emergency rooms each year.
Sports Concussion
For youth aged 13 to 18, there is a high risk of concussion. Around 8.8% went through a concussion during a sport. As a young person may put their head at risk, the relative risk of getting concussed for an 18-year-old is nearly twice as high as that for 13-year-olds.
Girls are 1.5 times more likely than boys to suffer a concussion from similar sports accidents. Athletes with a history of concussions are 3-5 times more likely to have another one.
Nevertheless, there is a high need for sports injury prevention for those with direct physical contact. Sports like wrestling and martial arts are the highest-risk sports for concussions.
Cheerleading has the next highest risk, followed by track and field and football. When overall risks are considered, no significant differences exist among players in different positions on a football team.
Education for Sports Injury Prevention
Most regions require certain laws to be passed for sports injury prevention, especially concussions. The regulation of concussion education for athletes and parents should include sports prevention injury techniques. Both concussion education programmes and the simple provision of printed media on concussions could help create awareness and change the culture.
Several private and public institutions are developing, implementing, and evaluating considerable-scale efforts to improve concussion knowledge and transform culture. They work on changing social norms, attitudes, and practices surrounding concussions across all age levels, from elementary school children through college students. There is little evidence, however, that sports injury prevention programs for athletic injuries programs change people’s behaviour.
Conclusion
Given the number of young people involved in sports and the game’s popularity in the United States, adequate awareness of the true extent, causes, consequences, and prevention of injuries like concussions becomes increasingly critical for young athletes ‘ health. Brain Warrior supports sports injury treatments and forms programs for sports injury prevention for safety.
