06/03/2015
Lowell Sun
By Peter Bailey-Wells
LOWELL -- Concussions are a hot topic in youth sports, and at UMass Lowell on Tuesday, Dr. Robert Cantu highlighted a panel of experts that discussed concussion prevention, treatment and awareness.
During his time at the microphone, Cantu emphasized the treatment of concussions in youth sports should differ from the treatments of adults with similar injuries. Referring to them as "youngsters" for the nearly two hours he spent on the panel, Cantu added that youth sports are key in establishing a healthy lifestyle but must be changed to deal with brain injuries properly.
A clinical professor in the Department of Neurosurgery at Boston University School of Medicine, Cantu is best known in the concussion field in his role as the co-director of the Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy, a brain bank at BU that studies traumatic brain injuries, or TBIs.
Cantu has also worked as a senior advisor to the NFL Head, Neck and Spine Committee, chaired an NFL Players Association committee on TBIs and consulted for the Boston College athletic department, specifically the football team.
Cantu opened his slides with a short video clip of a helmet-to-helmet tackle involving a pair of small children practicing for Pop Warner football. One child's head whipped back violently as he hit the ground and immediately began to cry.
"Kids are not just small adults," Cantu said. "Kids' brains have unique factors that put them at greater risk for injury than we adults."
Those factors include the development of the prefrontal cortex, a part of the brain that does not finish developing until a person's early 20s.
A smaller brain also accelerates faster when moving inside the skull and does not require a large impact to cause damage.
Cantu went on to elaborate on the increased risk of small children receiving concussions playing youth sports. This is due, in part, to the fact that children have smaller and weaker necks in relation to their skulls, which are nearly fully sized by age 5.
According to Cantu, this can result in 80 or 90 Gs of force on the brain, even when the speeds the children collide at is very slow.
Children exposed to contact sports before the age of 12 are more likely to have brain trauma later in life, according to Cantu. In February, the family of Joseph Chernach, who killed himself in 2012 at the age of 25, filed the first-ever concussion-related lawsuit against Pop Warner football. The Chernach's have alleged that Pop Warner did not teach coaches or players properly about equipment and didn't follow proper concussion-detection protocols. Chernach death was ultimately a result of the long-term neurological effects of multiple TBIs.
Both Cantu and other members of the panel discussed the pros and cons of current concussion education and prevention, which include informational literature, videos, baseline testing and follow-up testing. Massachusetts has a law in place that requires public schools to develop concussion protocols, but does not have a common policy between all schools.
Also on the panel were Dr. Constance Moore, a researcher and professor at UMass medical school, Dr. John Broderick, the president of Greater Lowell Chiropractic and Rehabilitation Inc., Linda Brown, the Massachusetts Department of Public Health's program coordinator for its concussion-prevention initiative, and Alex Krebs, former member of the U.S. Alpine Ski Team and a youth coordinator for the Vermont Alpine Racing Association.
During the question and answer session that followed the panel, the moderator asked, "What's the biggest need in this field right now?" and every member of the panel had the same response: funding. Forty-nine states and the District of Columbia have concussion education laws on the books and none are funded.
"They're all simply words on the page," Cantu said. "It's left voluntarily up to schools to report, it's left voluntarily up to parents, coaches and kids to say whether they're watching their cell phones or their (instructional) videos."