News

Two decades after the NFL brushed off concussion concerns as being of interest only to journalists, the issue is at the forefront of any discussion about player safety and unlikely to go away anytime soon.

Concussions are a problem. Everyone agrees on that. But it is rather less apparent how to define a concussion accurately, or how to diagnose, track and follow-up post-concussion. Effective treatment is based on the understanding of a clear problem that we are treating and assessing this requires accurate diagnostics, classification schemes, outcome measures and a single definition — all of which have eluded us to this point.

We know fairgoers are smart, but there’s also a unique opportunity at the Minnesota State Fair to help with brain research at HealthFair 11.

In Minnesota, as in the rest of the nation, traumatic brain injury (TBI) is the greatest cause of death and disability in people under the age of 35. Nationally, according to the CDC, TBI leads to almost 2.5 million hospitalizations, emergency department (ED) visits, and deaths.

Before the start of the 2015 season, Breck football coach Jon Martin held his usual meeting with parents of his players, giving them the lowdown on how he runs the program and trying to soothe fears stoked by media-fueled horror stories about head injuries.

According to Dr. Uzma Samadani, a University of Minnesota associate professor of neurosurgery and an attending neurosurgeon and brain injury researcher at HCMC, these are three key factors to football and brain health.

A Minneapolis hospital announced it will team up with the University of Minnesota for what it called “the nation’s largest study of concussions and traumatic brain injuries.”
Researchers at Hennepin County Medical Center will select hundreds of patients suffering from mild to severe brain injuries to participate in the study.

There are over 2.2 million annual visits to emergency departments (ED) for traumatic brain injury (TBI), according to the most recent data from the CDC. While some patients will end up being diagnosed with concussions after their initial ED visit, the reality is that there currently is not a comprehensive or even standardized approach in the ED for patients who suffer a TBI.

Hennepin County Medical Center and the University of Minnesota are launching what’s billed as the nation’s largest study of concussions and traumatic brain injuries, combining discoveries in brain imaging, blood analysis and eye tests to find a more accurate way to detect the injuries’ severity and long-term ramifications.

TBI is the leading cause of death and disability in Americans under age 35 and the leading cause of premature death and disability worldwide (1). In 2009 alone, 2.4 million patients presented to an emergency department (ED) with a TBI and an additional 52,695 died from their injury (2). Currently, at least 5.3 million U.S. residents live with long-term disabilities related to a TBI (3).