For Love of the Game & Its Players

It's Super Bowl Sunday!  As you know, it is being held at the Levi's Stadium in San Jose, CA this year! Although I am a football fan I must politely and non-violently protest the Super Bowl. Will Smith's movie, "Concussion," brings important and needed attention to this issue and yet the greatest loser in the Oscar nominations is not Will Smith as a black man who did not get nominated but the recognition that we are bashing our heads in but nobody really cares.  We still do not understand how many events are necessary to reach the threshold from which there is no return.

What I am calling for:  A very functional study allowing us to know when the level of brain damage has reached a threshold to which major nerve pathways in the brain are affected. As the most easily measured and most studied pathway, I am recommending the visual system. There are few professional athletes who do not have optimal functioning visual systems. In fact, most professional football teams have some of the best ophthalmic care along with the best refractive surgery available. Why? Because they are able to afford the best, etc. If that is the case we should be including visual evoked potentials for every single healthy athlete as part of their comprehensive baseline examination. Additionally, I believe that this will help us to create a better understanding of the disease process over time.

Finally, the funding for this additional level of study and additional medical technology requiring a high level of training should come from the National Football League. No, I love football and all the entertainment value and festivities associated with it. Don't get me wrong. It's just that I think this is a much much more important issue that we have an easy solution to so I am sending this as an open letter to the National Football League to do the right thing and do the best thing meet the gold standard of what we represent in our society is care for our citizens.

Interesting reads:

Click here for a 2010 paper from the New England Journal of Medicine, Perspective, on and overview on traumatic brain injury (TBI), and its long-term effects.

Click here for a 2014 paper from Diopsys and SUNY State College of Optometry on mild traumatic brain injury measured by visual evoked potential (VEP).

Click here for a 2015 paper from the British Journal of Sports Medicine on a cohort study of professional fighters and effects of sustained head trauma on brain structure and function.

Source:  http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2945234/