Sports Concussion
Below are a number of commonly-asked questions, some of them describing what concussions are all about from a scientific standpoint and others dealing with more practical issues.
People who are interested in the “nuts and bolts” of concussions will likely find the technical questions of interest; however, if you’re just interested in “what’s going on and what can I do” you need not read all the technical stuff to make sense of the practical information.
Some Technical Stuff
Some Practical Stuff
Side-line tests, which are often given by a team physician, coach, or trainer, are useful in determining whether the individual, at that point in time, does have concussive symptoms. This, in turn, is useful in determining whether the individual should return to play or seek medical evaluation. Side-line testing has only limited usefulness with respect to predicting long-term outcome, and it is also questionable what meaning they have when administered hours or days after the suspected concussion, as such delayed testing can both miss subtle persisting symptoms and identify possible concussion symptoms that are at that point in time being produced by other factors such as sleep loss, anxiety, or pain.