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 Overall, participation in high school sports has surged from less
than 4 million student athletes in 2001 to almost 4.6 million last
year, researchers report in JAMA Pediatrics. But participation in
football peaked in 2008 at 1.11 million athletes, and then declined
almost 5 percent to 1.06 million players by 2017.
“This decline is associated with media attention focused on
concussions or brain injuries among football players,” said study
co-author Dr. Chris Feudtner of the Children’s Hospital of
Philadelphia and the Perelman School of Medicine at the University
of Pennsylvania.
News reports about football and brain injuries - one indication of
public awareness about the health risks of head injuries on the
field - started becoming more common in 2009 and increased each year
through the end of the study.
“We are witnessing a large shift in behavior likely due to media
coverage,” Feudtner said by email.
If the 8 percent increase in football participation from 2001
through 2008 had continued through the end of the study period,
there would have been about 184,000 additional students playing this
sport by 2017, researchers estimated.
The absence of these players may have avoided between 6,700 and
14,000 concussions during the last football season in the study,
researchers calculated, based on a season with 10 games and 60
practices.
News reports in recent years have highlighted a number of health
problems associated with what’s known as chronic traumatic
encephalopathy (CTE), which is linked to the type of head-to-head
hits that have long been a part of tackle football at both the
amateur and professional level. Among other things, CTE is thought
to cause aggression and dementia.
CTE can only be diagnosed by examining brain tissue during an
autopsy. It is suspected in dozens of former high school, college
and NFL players including Hall of Fame linebacker Junior Seau and
Pro Bowl safety Dave Duerson, who both committed suicide.
The current study wasn’t a controlled experiment designed to prove
whether or how increasing awareness about CTE or media coverage of
football injuries may have impacted participation at the high school
level. It also wasn’t designed to examine the health effects of
brain injuries or collisions on the field.
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Still, this isn’t the first research to link increased awareness
about concussion risks to a decline in football participation among
children and teens, and parents’ fears about brain injuries are
likely contributing to a decline in participation, said Anthony
Kontos, a researcher at the sports medicine concussion program at
the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center.
The current study, however, may not have accurately estimated any
resulting changes in the number of brain injuries because it didn’t
look at the large number of youth players in non-scholastic leagues
like USA Football and Pop Warner, Kontos, who wasn’t involved in the
study, said by email.
“This study does suggest a shift to other sports,” said Dr. Monica
Vavilala, director of the Harborview Injury Prevention and Research
Center in Seattle.
“While at the outset, this might seem like we have solved the
problem of sports related concussion, this is not necessarily the
case because other sports are also associated with concussion such
as hockey, soccer, and basketball,” Vavilala, who wasn’t involved in
the study, said by email.
It’s also not clear how many athletes might have opted out of
football only to select other sports that also have a risk of
concussions, said Dr. Paul Echlin of the Elliott Sports Medicine
Clinic Burlington in Ontario, Canada. Head injuries are a risk with
all sports played in close quarters at high speeds that involve a
ball or other projectiles, Echlin, who wasn’t involved in the study,
said by email.
But parents should still urge teens considering tackle football to
consider another sport instead, Echlin advised.
“No child should be ethically allowed to participate in tackle
football,” Echlin said.
SOURCE: http://bit.ly/2GlITU7 JAMA Pediatrics, online March 12,
2018.
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