During Sunday’s Super Bowl, the showdown between the Denver Broncos and the Carolina Panthers, the competition is sure be fierce. There will be an estimated 130-plus plays consisting of hundreds of hits, tackles, spears, and lay outs. That translates into at least minor head trauma for most players.
In 2007, three former NFL players committed suicide. Andre Waters, 44, shot himself in the head after bouts with depression. Terry Long drank a bottle of antifreeze at 45. Thirty-six-year-old Justin Strzelczyk heard voices and died in a crash while fleeing police. Every autopsy was performed by physician Bennet Omalu, and every one had signs of brain damage. Omalu, a former neuropathologist at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, was the first to pinpoint forensic evidence of football-induced chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a variation of "boxer's dementia." Symptoms include confusion, mood disorders, slurred speech and memory loss. This caused heavy pressure on the NFL to address the problem. A new committee was formed, called the NFL Head, Neck, and Spine committee. This new committee gave an actual neurological insight into these traumatic injuries. Evan Breedlove, a mechanical engineering graduate student at Purdue University who studies neurotrauma in Indiana high-school football players, says that hitting a player in the head is like shaking a Jell-o mold on a platter. The brain shakes, and little splits called microhemorrhages can form. The splits also allow fluid in, which increases the likelihood of further concussions. "It's generally a bad thing when the brain gets exposed to the chemistry in the rest of your body," Breedlove says. The average NFL player sustains as many as 1,500 hits to the head throughout a season. It's the accumulation of impact after impact that does real damage. "The big hit may just be the straw that breaks the camel's back," he says.
According to the NFL, there were 271 documented game-related concussions this past season — the most recorded by the league since 2011. Roughly one-third of those were caused by helmet-to-helmet contact. One of the worst of those hits occurred in January, during a grinding back-and-forth playoff match between Cincinnati Bengals and the Pittsburgh Steelers, a game generally regarded as one of the season’s dirtiest. The number of concussions in the NFL has increased by at least 20 percent each season for the past three years. The rate of concussions among high-school and college players (where they go unreported) is probably much higher.
Many companies, most distinctly Riddell, have developed new helmets to help prevent concussions. During the 2011 season, NFL officials introduced "smart helmets" and mouthguards outfitted with accelerometers and radio-frequency identification to measure the location and direction of hits experienced during a game or practice. The data is wirelessly transmitted to a computer on the sidelines, which calculates the magnitude of the hit and the location of the blow. In a two-year pilot program with high-school and college players, the system gathered data on more than 1.5 million head impacts. Researchers at Riddell, the helmet's manufacturer, set a concussion threshold of 98 Gs per game—more than that, and they recommend benching the player. Each helmet costs about $1,000. A less-expensive helmet from Riddell, prepared for the 2012 season for high-school and college players, used a thin film to gauge hits. On impact, pressure compresses the film, which generates a charge, sending a signal to a handheld unit on the sideline. In 2010, Kevin Guskiewicz of the NFL's Head, Neck and Spine Committee said he would like to see "every player geared up with some kind of monitoring".
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