News & Headlines

In a set of four papers published August 7 in the Journal of Head Trauma Rehabilitation, a team of researchers at the University of Buffalo found that a small sample of 21 retired professional contact-sport athletes did not show any signs of early-onset dementia. This finding runs counter to the public perception brought on over the last few years by various teams of researchers examining the brains and cognitive functions of professional athletes in high-risk sports. But it’s not a final answer, just one more dimension of the picture.

Seattle Seahawks linebacker Joshua Perry has been forced to retire from football aged 24 due to concussion issues. The former Ohio State student revealed on Twitter that he had sustained the sixth concussion of his career, which had generated “huge concern” for his well-being. “I’ve recently sustained my sixth documented concussion,” he wrote. “It wasn’t from a high velocity, big contact play. It was a very pedestrian thing, and that was a huge concern to me. The last thing I want to do is put the health of my brain and my future wellbeing in jeopardy over a game and a paycheck.”

Losing your sense of smell isn’t something that’s obvious right away, like going blind or deaf. A smell is something we notice if it’s there. The absence of a smell is harder to discern. The side effects of concussions are well documented: headache, amnesia, vomiting, loss of consciousness. Research is growing around chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a degenerative brain disease that affects football players and others who suffered repeated blows to the head. But I didn’t know a concussion can destroy your sense of smell.

Concussion is a common brain injury. But what actually happens to the brain when we are concussed? As part of the Body of Evidence series, BBC Future explores what happens in the brain after a bang on the head.

Over the past six months, reporters working on a series about high school sports concussions in Oregon have made 235 requests for records — or rather, the same request 235 times. Oregon has one state law to govern how local jurisdictions handle public records. But the responses to this same request are wide and varied across the state.

Concussions in athletes have received attention in recent years, but experts are now looking to also address the needs of a large, yet overlooked, population – domestic abuse victims. Most of the blows from an abuser are to one of the most vulnerable parts of the body and, over years of daily and weekly incidents, those hits take a toll. “In a domestic violence situation, a lot of the abuse is focused on the head,” said Jonathan Lifshitz, director of the Translational Neurotrauma Research Program at the University of Arizona. Lifshitz said that football players, who encounter significant blows but are supported by on-hand medical assistance at games and in the off-season, have a different brain-injury reality than abuse victims. Brain injury research has followed soldiers after combat and professional athletes but the subjects have been mostly male, Zieman said. Researchers are just beginning to understand differences between men and women with concussions.

A new study published this week in The Lancet Psychiatry reaffirms that traumatic brain injuries (TBIs), even those that are relatively mild, are linked to a higher risk of dementia in our later years. The researchers obtained and studied the medical records of 2.5 million Danish-born residents living in the country in 1995. (Unlike many countries, including the US, the medical histories of residents of Scandinavian countries like Denmark are easily tracked through various nationwide registries). They then looked ahead in time to see how many of the Danes over the age of 50 would go on to be diagnosed with dementia at some point between 1999 to 2013.

Young children who are hospitalized with head injuries may be at higher than average risk for developing attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) later on, a small study suggests. U.S. researchers examined data on 187 children, including 81 who were hospitalized overnight for a traumatic brain injury (TBI) at some point from age 3 to 7, and 106 who were hospitalized with other injuries. None of the kids had ADHD at the start.

“I use to be – I still try to be – outgoing and friendly to everybody. People knew me as the kid who was always smiling, and trying to make other people,” Salamone said. “And I’m trying to be happy again,” he adds, “but it’s a lot harder now.” Salamone is also at risk of losing the college education he worked so hard to obtain. After his injury, Vanguard University agreed to delay Salamone’s enrollment for one year, but he will lose his spot at the college and his scholarship if he is not ready to attend by the fall semester.

Four eighth-graders have gained national recognition for designing a device that fits into a football helmet that can detect concussions. Middle School students Jake Carlin, Josh Chostaka, Alex Fisherman and Ian Langan say that they were inspired to create the device when a friend was hurt playing football. “One of our good friends got a really bad concussion during a game, so we felt that making something like this would help coaches and trainers keep their teams safe,” Langan says. The 14-year-olds developed a sensor that fits into a football helmet. Real-time data is transmitted directly to a smartphone, using an app that they also designed.