Source: sciencenewsforstudents.org | Repost Duerson Fund 6/13/2022 –
American football is a rough game, even at the middle-school level. A new study finds that the heads of young players can get hit hundreds of times each season. And those hits can leave their mark on a young player’s brain, researchers now report.
The hits causing changes do not even have to be hard enough to cause a concussion, a type of traumatic brain injury.
Jillian Urban is a biomedical engineer at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, N.C. Her team attached devices to the padding inside helmets worn by 195 boys who play football. Most of the kids ranged in age from 10 to 14. Sensors in their helmets recorded changes in the rate and direction of their heads’ movements. These data showed how many times each kid’s head had sustained a hit during play, along with where and how hard each hit had been.