On Friday, Sept. 28, 2007, The Brown Daily Herald published the following story about a Brown University alumnus who, after suffering a TBI in 2004, started a foundation for brain injury patients. From the article:

A month after his graduation, Charlie Maddock '04 was hit by a car and suffered an often-fatal traumatic brain injury. Two years later, in 2006, he founded the Charles Maddock Foundation, a nonprofit foundation that supports patients who have suffered brain trauma.

Maddock was crossing the street in New York City when he was hit by a taxi cab and crashed through its windshield. He received several severe physical injuries, including a fractured jaw and shattered pelvis. The most critical injury, however, was the trauma to his brain, which swelled due to the impact of hitting the cab.

Maddock was taken to New York Presbyterian Hospital, where he underwent surgery to reduce the intracranial pressure in his skull.

According to the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, approximately 1.4 million people sustain a traumatic brain injury, or TBI, in the United States annually. Of that number, 50,000 die. Other long-term effects of TBI can include epilepsy and a greater risk of Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases.

"I was one of the lucky ones," Maddock told The Herald.

After leaving the hospital, Maddock still had the difficult task of rehabilitating from the physical and emotional pain of his TBI. The affliction is often called an "invisible epidemic," Maddock said, because people who survive a TBI are forever changed.

The story later notes:

TBI has recently received national media due to the increasing amount of head injuries for soldiers stationed in Iraq. About 10 to 20 percent of the 35,000 screened "health returnees" from Iraq and Afghanistan had "experienced a mild TBI during deployment," the New York Times reported in July.

And:

TBI has also made the national news because of the large number of NFL players with head trauma. In June 2007, late Pittsburgh Steelers offensive lineman Justin Strzelczyk was found to have signs of a condition associated with the elderly or boxers with dementia. Strzelczyk is the fourth NFL player to be found with this condition, which is thought to be caused by repeated concussions on the football field.

Read the article.

Labels: Iraq War, NFL, TBI, traumatic brain injury

N.Y. Times, June 10, 2007 --

For several years, many medical experts have maintained that high school football players who sustain concussions should not return to the games in which they are injured. So when doctors commissioned by the National Football League published a study two years ago concluding “it might be safe” for such players to do so, the assertion sparked widespread criticism. Now the criticism is coming from authors of the paper itself.

Two of the five authors of the paper published in the journal Neurosurgery, Dr. Henry Feuer of the Indiana University Medical Center and Dr. Cynthia Arfken of Wayne State University, said in telephone interviews last week that the paper’s conclusion was inappropriate, and that the research should not be applied to high school and college players.

Arfken also said the passage had been added without her knowledge.

The two principal authors, Dr. David Viano of Wayne State and Dr. Ira Casson of Long Island Jewish Medical Center, acknowledged that they had altered the conclusion but said that all authors had received proof copies before publication. They said the section in question was added to appease peer reviewers who asked for a discussion of high school and college players, and they continued to stand by what was written.

Arfken and Feuer disavowed the paper’s recommendation that high school and college medical personnel “keep an open mind” about the paper’s analysis of concussions, which deemed safe the league’s record of allowing half of the players with concussions to return to the same game. Arfken and Feuer thereby joined critics who had long claimed that such a suggestion was dangerous for younger players. Their less-developed brain tissue is believed to be more susceptible to short- and long-term damage than adults’. They also receive considerably less medical attention than players in the N.F.L.

Feuer said that he “would change that sentence; I’d eliminate it.” Regarding high school players, he added: “It’s been shown that they don’t seem to recover as fast. Period.”

Continuing reading the article.

Labels: concussion, NFL, TBI, traumatic brain injury

New York Times, May 31, 2007 --

The rate of diagnosed clinical depression among retired National Football League players is strongly correlated with the number of concussions they sustained, according to a study to be published today.

The study was conducted by the University of North Carolina’s Center for the Study of Retired Athletes and based on a general health survey of 2,552 retired N.F.L. players. It corroborates other findings regarding brain trauma and later-life depression in other subsets of the general population, but runs counter to longtime assertions by the N.F.L. that concussions in football have no long-term effects.

Later in the article:
While consistently defending its teams’ treatment of concussions and denying any relationship between players’ brain trauma and later neurocognitive decline, the N.F.L. has subsequently announced several related initiatives. The league and its players union recently created a fund to help pay the medical expenses of players suffering from Alzheimer’s disease or similar dementia. Last week, N.F.L. Commissioner Roger Goodell announced wide-ranging league guidelines regarding concussions, from obligatory neuropsychological testing for all players to what he called a “whistle-blower system” where players and doctors can anonymously report any coach’s attempt to override the wishes of concussed players or medical personnel.

Mr. Goodell said last week that the league’s concussion committee had just begun its own study “to determine if there are any long-term effects of concussions on retired N.F.L. players.”

Dr. Casson, the committee’s co-chair, said that players who retired from 1986 through 1996 would be randomly approached to undergo “a comprehensive neurological examination, and a comprehensive neurologic history, including a detailed concussion history,” using player recollection cross-referenced with old team injury reports. He said that the study would take two to three years to be completed and another year to be published.

Read the complete article here.

Also, don't miss this site for more information about head injuries and football (from youth ball to the NFL).

Labels: concussion, Depression, NFL, TBI, TBI research, traumatic brain injury

The NFL's Committee on Mild Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) has come under fire from several sources reports the Baltimore Sun. The flack started last fall when ESPN The Magazine published an article critical of the committee's report and said "the committee skewed its data to minimize the effect and nature of concussions," a charge rejected as "totally false" by Dr. Andrew Tucker, a member of the committee since 1994 and a Ravens team physician.

Among its criticisms, the magazine said Dr. Elliot Pellman, who recently resigned as committee chair, "omitted large numbers of baseline reports from neuropsychological testing in a six-year study to arrive at figures more favorable to the league."

"People on the outside see it as industry-funded research and research that is not as accurate or sound as it should be," said Dr. Kevin Guskiewicz, the research director of the Center for the Study of Retired Athletes at the University of North Carolina, which has been criticized by Pellman's group for some of its work.

"That was basically done to protect the image of the game, of the league. It's troubling to me and many others that there is all this work out on retired NFL players and they have chosen to ignore the findings."

Read the entire article here and then tell us what you think. Is the NFL doing enough to protect its players and provide for them long term?

Labels: brain injuries, concussion, NFL, TBI, traumatic brain injury