College athletes experience worse outcomes after injury due to concussions suffered outside of sport
Researchers at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) found that college athletes had worse outcomes after injury due to concussions suffered outside of sports than those they experienced while playing sports. In addition, female athletes who sustained their injuries outside of exercise had more severe symptoms and more sports days lost due to injuries than male athletes. These findings suggest the need for improved recognition, reporting, and monitoring of concussions outside of sport.
The study was recently published online by the Journal of Athletic Training.
Concussions can affect the daily functioning and quality of life of those who sustain them. Prompt recognition of symptoms and early access to care can help minimize these effects. Most concussion research has focused primarily on injuries that occur during sports, but those studies often exclude concussions that can occur outside of sports, usually due to falls or car accidents. Some studies have shown that patients with non-sports-related concussions have worse outcomes, but research on these effects in college-age patients is very limited.
“Patients who experience a concussion outside of sport may lack the resources that athletes who sustain their injury on the field have for concussion care, such as immediate access to health care providers such as athletic trainers,d said first author Patricia Roby, PhD, one of the researchers. injury scientist who conducted this study while she was a postdoctoral researcher at CHOP.
To help address this gap in knowledge, researchers analyzed data from the National Collegiate Athletic Association-Department of Defense Concussion Assessment, Research, and Education (CARE) Consortium. A total of 3,500 college athletes participated in the study, including 555 who had suffered a non-sports-related concussion. More than 40% of participating athletes were female, allowing potential differences in recovery between men and women to be explored.
The study found that athletes who had suffered non-sports related concussions were less likely to report their injuries immediately, possibly due to a lack of recognition of the symptoms outside the sporting environment or a hesitation to report the injury caused by unusual or careless mechanisms . Athletes who suffered non-sports-related concussions reported greater severity of their symptoms, more days with symptoms, and more days of sport lost due to injuries compared to patients who suffered sport-related concussions, and these findings were even more true in female patients compared with male patients.
“Our findings demonstrate that non-athletic mechanisms of concussion injury are an important consideration in college-age young adults, something we had already described in our study in younger children. There is an opportunity to improve clinical outcomes by raising awareness and increasing concussion education. That happens outside of sports and also reduces barriers to healthcare reporting in this older age group,” said senior study author Christina L. Master, MD, clinical director of the Minds Matter Concussion Program at CHOP. “Additionally, our findings regarding gender differences in the trajectory of these injuries require additional research to see the extent to which reporting behavior and access to medical teams contribute to this disparity in outcomes.”
This study was supported by the National Institute of Neurologic Disorders and Stroke of the National Institutes of Health, grants R01NS097549 and T32NS043126, and the Grand Alliance Concussion Assessment, Research, and Education (CARE) Consortium, funded in part by the National Collegiate Athletic Association. NCAA) and the Department of Defense (DOD). This work was also supported by the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Health Affairs, through the Combat Casualty Care Research Program, endorsed by the Department of Defense, through the Joint Program Committee 6/Combat Casualty Care Research Program – Psychological Health and Program for traumatic brain injury under award number W81XWH1420151.
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