How Worried Should We Be About Soccer Players & Concussions? Should Heading in Soccer Be Banned?

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Are they trying to panic us, these experts who are telling us that girls who play soccer rank second behind boys who play football when it comes to the number of concussions they sustain? Brian Williams' primetime news show Rock Center ran two long segments on NBC the other night asserting that girls with long, thin necks are especially susceptible to concussions on the soccer field. They even go as far to label concussions a "crisis" in girls' soccer.

"The number of girls suffering concussions in soccer accounts for the second largest amount of all concussions reported by young athletes, according to the American Journal of Sports Medicine," NBC reported. "Football tops the list."

They quoted the director of sports medicine at a Massachusetts hospital, neurosurgeon Dr. Bob Cantu as saying:

"What's happening in this country is an epidemic of concussions, number one, and the realization that many of these individuals are going to go on to post-concussion syndrome, which can alter their ability to function at a high level for the rest of their lives."

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So what does this mean for our soccer playing daughters, and our sons for that matter? For my 13-year-old daughter who idolizes Abby Wambach and Mia Hamm? We know that participating in sports is extremely beneficial for girls, so what are sports parents supposed to do with this scary information?

Dr. Cantu recommends banning heading in soccer for athletes 14 and younger. I'm very cool with that. (I cringe every time a kids' head makes contact with a soccer ball.) He also suggests that if girls have "very long, thin necks" they should go through a "neck strengthening program if they're playing a collision sport." Say what now? What's a neck strengthening program? Shouldn't youth soccer leagues be made aware of these things and implement them, maybe get pediatricians on board?

I've already informed my two soccer resident players, much to their horror, that I don't want them heading the soccer ball any more. (My son went bananas and said my irrational dictate would be responsible for him getting kicked off his recreational soccer team, something echoed by a female soccer player in the NBC interview). Other than banning heading and promoting neck strengthening exercises, about which I'm still unclear, what else are we supposed to do?

The NBC reporter Kate Snow and the Rock Center host Brian Williams have had or do have children who play soccer and didn't have many suggestions except for parents to be on the look out for symptoms of concussions. "We're not down on soccer," Snow said. ". . . If something looks wrong . . . take the kid out of the game, wait it out. It's better to be safe than sorry."

Here's the link to the Centers for Disease Control page on concussions, including the symptoms for which parents of youth athletes are supposed to look.

Using His Noggin: The Youngest Boy & His Hockey Head Injury

Neither The Spouse nor I saw the play. We didn’t even know it had occurred until many hours later when The Youngest Boy told us he had a bad headache and had had a headache since he experienced a head-on collision with another player during the 7 a.m. hockey game and then fell backwards, also hitting the back of his helmeted head on the ice.

“What?” I said, momentarily stunned. I hadn’t seen any collision, maybe I'd missed it because I was chatting with a friend while trying to wake up by gulping down a large cup of coffee. My youth hockey player had been acting normally all day long following the game, vigorously playing, eating and not at all displaying the traditional signs that he’d sustained a concussion.

When he asked for some Tylenol after dinner, I knew he wasn’t kidding around, so I gave him some and told him to go to bed.

Yesterday morning he woke up and said his headache was still bothering him. I began to worry, despite the fact that he hadn’t been knocked out, lethargic, vomited or “seen stars” after the collision.

However when he came home from school yesterday afternoon and said his headache was still there, even though he was able to run around and play, I decided to call the pediatrician’s office.

“I don’t know if it’s a concussion,” I said over the phone. “He’s been acting normally. But it’s the headaches that are worrying me.”

Apparently I was right to worry, or so the pediatrician’s office folks told me, citing the work of a renowned medical expert in the field of children and brain injuries. We need to treat him with kid gloves, the nurse said before she gave me a list of things The Youngest Boy could not do until he’d been headache-free for a week:

• No sports
• No gym class
• No playing outside (including outdoor recess)
• No cardiovascular activity
• No HD TV
• No computer/iPod Touch/Nintendo DS screentime
• No drumming (he’s a drummer in his school band) 

When The Spouse and I told The Youngest Boy about the restrictions he reacted as though we’d cancelled Christmas. (We told him the bans were for “at least” a week, leaving out the detail about being “headache free” for seven days because we don’t want him to pretend he’s fine in order to get back out onto the ice quicker.) We likened this to a broken leg around which you’d put a cast, only you can’t put a cast on your head. We need to protect his bruised brain from getting seriously damaged. If, say, he went to hockey practice and fell down, he'd knock around his already injured brain, we said, making things worse. You need time to heal.

We told him about all the cautionary tales of pro athletes who’ve been forced to leave their sports and have continued to suffer from excruciating headaches years after they stopped playing because they didn’t give themselves time to recover from this largely invisible injury. (It was ironic that, over the weekend, I’d read a harrowing interview in the New York Times with former NFL star Kris Jenkins who had to abandon his football career in his early 30s due to injuries and is plagued by pain to this day.)

Upon mentioning the situation on Twitter, one of my Twitter pals suggested, “[You] can remind [the] kid the docs told P. Bergeron same stuff, and now he's better. Even the big kids have to be careful,” referring to Bruins player Patrice Bergeron who has experienced a severe concussion, allowed himself to heal, and then returned to the ice.

I later learned, after doing my own internet sleuthing that the expert whose advice the pediatrician’s office was following has offered this controversial advice in order to protect children’s brains: Collision sports should be limited to those ages 14 and older.

 
“The young brains are more vulnerable, they're less myelinated, the necks are weaker, the heads are bigger proportionately so the forces that accelerate the brain need not be as high to produce higher accelerations,” Robert Cantu, the co-director of the Neurologic Sports Injury Center at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, told a Boston TV station, noting that he has seen otherwise asymptomatic teenage athletes who play contact sports who, once their brains are scanned, exhibit symptoms of degenerative brain disease, which can lead to "personality changes, memory loss, depression, even dementia," the news station reported.

"We have millions of youngsters putting their heads into collision sports right now and we don't really know how safe this is for them," he said to WCVB. "

Even with that horrifyingly scary info in mind, this is going to be a difficult prescription for The Youngest Boy, who’s very active and loves to race around, to follow.

This morning he woke up and told me he still has a headache.

Damn this is going to seem like a very long week.