“National Study Finds 70 Percent Increase in Basketball-Related Traumatic Brain Injuries.” That is the headline of a press release from the Center for Injury Research and Policy at Nationwide Children’s Hospital, one that was picked up almost verbatim by Bloomberg and dozens of other media outlets, which is how I learned of it. 70% increase in traumatic brain injuries!
Are you terrified? I am. Or, rather, I was. After reading the full article and referencing other studies, the terror downgraded to concern.
I have many goals for I’ve Been Talking to Your Kids. One of the most important is this: I want everyone who cares about kids to become savvy consumers of research. Numbers out of context can lead to erroneous conclusions and even hysteria about the safety or behaviors of our kids, which, in turn, can cause us to focus our efforts on the wrong things. 100% of the people typing this know that.
One question to ask is, what is a “Traumatic Brain Injury”? The Mayo Clinic offers this definition of a Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI):
Traumatic brain injury is usually the result of a sudden, violent blow to the head — which launches the brain on a collision course with the inside of the skull. This collision can bruise the brain, tear nerve fibers and cause bleeding.
Traumatic brain injury may also be caused by objects such as bullets or even a shattered piece of the skull entering brain tissue.
The severity of traumatic brain injury can vary greatly, depending on the part of the brain affected and the extent of the damage. A mild traumatic brain injury may cause temporary confusion and headache, but a serious one can be fatal.
As person who cares about kids, I am stymied. When I first learned of this 70% increase in TBI, I wanted to mandate helmets for all basketball players. Now that I learn that a TBI can cause everything from a headache to death, I do not know what to do. I can live with a 70% increase in headaches. I cannot live with a 70% increase in deaths.
Regardless, “Traumatic Brain Injury” seems like an excessively frightening name for a condition that the Center for Injury Research and Policy at Nationwide Children’s Hospital later refers to as “a concussion.” Since reading the article I learned that not all TBIs are concussions, but concussions are the most common sort.
Another question to ask is, is a 70% increase in TBI a lot in actual numbers? For example, if the number went from 10 to 17, I might conclude that is acceptable given the number basketball players in the US. According to the Center for Injury Research and Policy at Nationwide Children’s Hospital, an average of 375,350 children and adolescents are injured each year playing basketball. TBIs accounted for 7,030 (1.9%) of those injuries in 1997 and 11,948 (3.2%) of them in 2007. 11,948 certainly seems like a big number. It is twice the high estimate of the number of people struck by lightning each year, but a third the annual number of successful suicides in the US. Again, I am at a loss. The number is too big to ignore, but other, scarier things impact a greater number of our Nation’s young people.
You may also want to ask, what is the alternative? Not playing basketball? 12%, or close to 2 million, of our high school students are obese. Discouraging any physical activity seems imprudent. Wear helmets? We know from another study that wearing helmets is incredibly difficult to enforce, especially in casual play. The Center for Injury Research and Policy at Nationwide Children’s Hospital believes that educating parents, coaches and players to better recognize the symptoms of TBI may help mitigate more damaging consequences of such injuries. This seems prudent. Moreover, we already know that in every area of childcare increasing live adult oversight of kids is more effective than mechanizing control.
My conclusion? A relatively small but growing number of kids are receiving concussions while playing basketball. By teaching parents, coaches and players to recognize the dangers and symptoms of concussions, we can help prevent the more serious consequence of such injuries and even stop the injuries from happening in the first place. Now why wasn’t that the headline?
