Contact sport athletes are returning to play too soon after concussion, study finds

Research shows contact athletes are returning to play too soon.
Image: Shutterstock

New research from Monash University into brain changes post-concussion indicates that the brain remains injured and potentially vulnerable after more than two weeks – raising concerns that new AFL concussion guidelines may be still allowing athletes to return to play before the brain has fully recovered.

In a paper published in the journal, Cerebral Cortex, Monash researchers conducted MRI scans on concussed athletes from amateur Australian Football clubs in Melbourne at both 48-hours and 2 weeks after their concussion, and compared them to non-concussed athletes.

The long-term consequences of sport concussions

Georgia Symons (left) and Will O'Brien (right) are CCS PhD students
in the Monash Trauma Group and both are first authors on papers
investigating concussion in sport. See respectively
Symons et al. paper; O'Brien et al. paper

Australian football is the most popular collision sport in Australia – with an average of 6-7 concussions occurring every 1000 match hours across amateur and professional leagues. Despite this high incidence of mild traumatic brain injury, there has been little study of the long-term neurological damage associated with this sport.

Two recently published studies by the Monash Trauma Group in Central Clinical School's Department of Neuroscience looked at the long-term consequences of concussion on the sporting field. They found that indicators of brain injury in the blood and saliva can be persistently changed for years after the injury.