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 Researchers surveyed 70 students who received emergency treatment
for concussions and 108 teens and young adults treated for other
injuries.
With a concussion, students took an average of 5.4 days to return to
school, compared with 2.8 days for other injuries.
One week after getting hurt, 42 percent of the students with
concussions received academic help such as tutoring or extra time
for tests, compared with 25 percent with other injuries. One month
afterwards, 31 percent of the concussion group got help, as did 24
percent of the other students.
“After a concussion, there is an energy crisis in the brain; the
brain needs more energy to heal than it has available,” said lead
study author Erin Wasserman of the University of North Carolina at
Chapel Hill.
“Because of this, individuals experience symptoms like headache and
dizziness, they have trouble sleeping, they may experience
depression, and they often have trouble concentrating and
remembering things,” Wasserman, who completed the study at the
University of Rochester, said by email.
“All of these symptoms are known to cause problems in school,”
Wasserman added.
To assess how concussions impact schoolwork, Wasserman and
colleagues surveyed student athletes treated at three emergency
departments in the Rochester, New York, area from September 2013 to
January 2015.
They excluded students who went to the emergency department more
than 24 hours after the injury or who were hurt badly enough to
require a hospital admission.
For the comparison group without concussions, researchers only
included athletes with isolated injuries to the extremities, such as
an arm broken in one place. Concussed students were excluded if
brain scans showed what’s known as acute intracranial lesions, or
badly damaged tissue.
Researchers asked about symptoms and school performance one week and
one month after injuries. Questions touched on things like their
concentration skills, ability to do well on tests or quizzes, and
symptoms like headaches and dizziness. Scores ranged from 0 to 174
with higher scores indicating worse academic difficulties.
At one week, 83 percent of the concussed students reported
impairments in at least one area that they didn’t experience before
the injury, as did 60 percent of students with extremity injuries,
researchers report in the American Journal of Public Health.
Also at one week, concussed students had academic dysfunction scores
15 points higher on average than their peers with other injuries at
63 and 48, respectively. After one month, though, their scores were
similar: 42 with concussions and 40 with other injuries.
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One limitation of the study is that 24 percent of concussed students
hadn’t returned to school within a week of their injury and were
excluded from the analysis. That may mean only the less-impaired
students were included and for others impairment after concussion
could be worse than observed in the study.
With concussions, students may also have vision problems or
difficulties with eye movements that impact school performance, said
Anthony Kontos, research director of the sports medicine concussion
program at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center.
“Some students may experience difficulty shifting from near to far –
like from a textbook to a chalkboard – following concussion,” Kontos,
who wasn’t involved in the study, said by email.
With the potential for vision and concentration issues as well as
symptoms like headaches and dizziness to complicate schoolwork,
doctors advise students to take frequent breaks and try to stop work
before symptoms get bad, said Dr. John Leddy medical director of the
concussion management clinic at the University at Buffalo.
“We don’t know for sure what the cause of difficulty with
concentration and memory in school is but a common report is that of
cognitive intolerance; that is, students cannot do their work for
sustained periods of time before becoming very fatigued and thus
unable to process new information,” Leddy, who wasn’t involved in
the study, said by email.
“Academic problems likely reflect an issue of cognitive intolerance
due to an inefficient brain after concussion,” Leddy added.
SOURCE: http://bit.ly/1TE74ha American Journal of Public Health,
online May 19, 2016.
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