Washington University

Ankle Sprain = Lower Neurocognitive Scores?

Dustin FinkLeave a comment

According to some recent research out of Toronto, to be published in the American Journal of Sports Medicine, led by Michael Hutchison this is the case.  Any athlete suffering an injury showed declines in neurocognitive testing, significantly compared to a control group.

In this study both concussed athletes and other injured athletes were compared to a control group of uninjured athletes;

For the current study, researchers at the University of Toronto gave the 20-minute computer test to 72 student-athletes, including football, hockey, and lacrosse players. Eighteen of those athletes had suffered a concussion in the past three days, and another 18 had been taken out recently by a muscle or tendon injury.

The other 36, used for comparison, were uninjured.

We would all suspect that the concussion group would decline Continue reading →

Military Once Again Trying To Lead Pack

Dustin FinkLeave a comment

A military study done at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri and abroad looking that the brains of blast injured servicemen from Iraq and Afghanistan shows a ‘early first step’ toward possibly having the imaging technology to discover concussions;

Using a highly sensitive type of magnetic resonance imaging, researchers studied 63 servicemen wounded by explosions in Iraq or Afghanistan and found evidence of brain injuries in some that were too subtle to be detected by standard scans. All the men already had a diagnosis of mild traumatic brain injury (synonymous with concussion), based on symptoms like having lost consciousness in the blast, having no memory of it or feeling dazed immediately afterward.

As reported in the New York Times Dr. David Brody and his colleagues have posted a study in the New England Journal of Medicine looking at the diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) a function of a standard MRI.  This type of imaging study does not take any longer to perform but can look even ‘deeper’ in the brain for subtle changes; Continue reading →