Jarek, 16, returned to high school in Norwich, Conn., on Monday after a neurologist sent him home for most of last week. He suffered a concussion during football practice, and while the nausea and blurred vision he endured in class the next day had gone away, the headaches continued.
Still banned from football on doctor's orders, he's "not doing too bad," said his mother, Donna Dombrowski. But the headaches have been coming back in the afternoons.
Dombrowski said the recent news reports about retired NFL players blaming mental problems on gridiron head injuries have made her think about Jarek. She isn't sure how concerned to be. And while she enjoys seeing him play, she's torn about whether she wants him to suit up again.
In fact, experts say they know very little about long-term medical risks of concussion for America's football players still in high school.
A congressional hearing in Washington on Wednesday focused on the NFL. A month ago, a preliminary study suggested that retired football players may have a higher than normal rate of Alzheimer's disease or other memory problems, presumably because of head injuries. But at the hearing, Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., said he'd seek records on head injuries in amateur ranks as well, "because of the effect on the millions of players at the college, high school and youth levels."
Every year, as many as 1 in 10 high school football players has a concussion, estimated Kevin Guskiewicz of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is lead author of the National Athletic Trainers' Association position statement on concussion management.
He said nobody has followed such players systematically for a decade or more to see what effect concussions might have.
He sees reason for concern. In 2005, he published a study of retired pro players that found having three or more concussions was associated with a heightened risk of mild cognitive impairment after age 50.
"One would assume a high school player who likewise had three or more during his high school years would potentially be predisposed to some of these same long-term neurodegenerative conditions that NFL players are," he said. But, he stressed, there's no evidence for that.
Mark Lovell, who directs the sports medicine concussion program at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, said he has begun to collect data on long-term consequences of high school concussions. He noted that the kind of careful mental testing his center does has not been widely used until fairly recently, so there is no big database yet of people who've been followed a long time since high school.
As it stands now, "we can't look into the future" and tell who is going to develop a long-term problem from one or more concussions, he said.
"I can tell you that I don't think anyone knows exactly what the long-term risk is, and I wish I did.... For a given kid, if we knew that kid was going to be at risk for long-term problems, we could get him or her in a different sport early on," Lovell said.
So what can be done now to reduce the risk of long-term trouble?
