CHARLESTON, W.Va. — A “concussion discussion” helped to teach parents, coaches and staff members what concussions are and how to identify them more easily.
Thursday’s discussion in Charleston was organized by the Kanawha-Charleston Health Department and featured neurosurgeon Calvin Whaley and emergency physician Jim Kyle.
Whaley discussed the importance of recognizing brain injuries and the steps following the concussion. He emphasized the symptoms to watch out for.
“So, what do we want to get from this talk? You know why are we here. We want to understand some basics: What is a concussion? What is a traumatic brain injury?” Whaley said.
He started at the beginning with the definition of what concussions are. And he wants everyone to know that not every concussion can look the same for different people.
“If we break it down, we can say complex, there are a lot of difference symptoms to concussions; it’s not just one thing you see, it’s not just one pattern that’s going to be the same for every athlete or every person that experiences a concussion,” Whaley said.
Whaley continued saying that concussions occur when trauma occurs to the head. Symptoms like headache, sleepiness, depression, and anxiety can be traced back to underlying experiences like a concussion or a traumatic brain injury.
The sports that are at the highest risk are the combat and contact sports, the ones that result in more physical contact that could end in a concussion or traumatic brain injury.
“A combat sport would be boxing, mixed martial arts, something where there’s fighting going on between two people,” Whaley said. “The highest risk contact sport, interestingly enough is rugby. And that makes sense because there doing a lot of the same things our football players are doing, without pads, without helmets.”
He emphasized the importance of knowing symptoms of concussions and more severe brain injuries.
“Our physical symptoms include things like headache — that’s probably our most common concussion symptom — nausea, vomiting, balance problems; players that stagger in the moment, they might be uncoordinated.” Whaley said.
He later cautioned that if a player loses consciousness they should be seen immediately by a doctor.
Kyle described a reduction in concussions in the National Football League, with new procedures put into place. He wanted to let coaches know that they can start reducing the likelihood of concussions before gameday.
“The NFL had a fifty percent reduction in preseason concussions in the last three years,” Kyle said.
He went on to say that the decrease in preseason concussions is a direct result of the new way that football players practice, limiting full-contact drills under guidelines established through the oversight of the NFL’s chief medical officer, Dr. Alan Sills.
Kyle said Sills managed to watch every concussion through replays, from different angles in order to come to a conclusion on how to reduce the number of concussions in players.
The next concussion discussion will be Oct 9 for physicians and doctors.