New System Quantifies Impact Of Brain Trauma

From Hugo Lloris to Tom Brady to Owen Farrell, the issue of concussive head trauma and what it means long and short term to athletes in many sports and of all ages is perhaps one of the greatest debates raging on both sides of the Atlantic.

Doctors are becoming more and more attune to the issue, and the uniqueness of even slight brain injury that has occurred in all contact sports, from basketball to rugby, soccer to volleyball, for as long as team sports have existed. However now with the aid of technology and social media, we are more aware than ever before, and more and more is being presented through cutting edge technology to figure out how to make athletes safer, and healthier, for when their time on the pitch, court or field is long gone.

One of the sports that has had to deal with the most controversy has been the National Football League. As the leader in all forms of American football, the NFL has been front and center on every concussion, traumatic spine injury, technology and long term care issue that has arisen in recent years around the sport of football. They have become a lightning rod for controversy in and around the violence and athleticism of the game, and have spent millions trying to find ways to rectify a problem, serious injury in sport, that can only be amended and not eliminated. If you have athletes of any age and add in some contact, there will be injuries. 

From the Seattle Seahawks experimenting with rugby tackling techniques to a program called “Heads Up Football” (which teaches young people not to lower their helmet when making contact) to all sorts of devices and wearable technology designed to measure and mitigate impact, the NFL is waging war for all participants against the effects, both long and short term, of serious traumatic injury, especially to the head.  

However one of those areas around concussion still drawing controversy is how to best measure and mitigate the issues of injury. This week Bloomberg.com looked at the positive and negatives of one of those factors, establishing a rating system for helmets that has, by default, become an industry standard. 

The system, STAR (Summation of Tests for the Analysis of Risk) was formulated by a team of scientists at Virginia Tech University, led by Stefan Duma, the professor who helped create the ratings and oversees them as head of Virginia Tech’s School of Biomedical Engineering and Sciences. Duma has spent more time with crash test dummies than he has with perhaps his own family, helping measure out the effects of trauma on the human body. They used that same principle to rate and measure the blow to the head through football helmets, assigning numerical values indicating helmets’ ability to absorb impacts. Helmets are then ranked from best to worst and grouped into categories: Five stars indicate the most protection, one star the least, independent of brand.

Some of the biggest brands, like the Schutt Company, have taken exception to the limits of the rating system, while others have embraced it, and use the system as a way to market their helmets to players of all ages. (21 starters in Sunday’s Super Bowl will wear helmets given five stars and manufactured by the Ridell Company).

However the biggest benefit to the STARS rating system is it does establish a well thought out baseline to work from, and gives uniformity to an area of sport that was very much inconsistent before, using the measurement of over 2 million impacts to the head with all sorts of variables factored in. It is not an exact science, but it is a helpful barometer of how far science has come in setting standards for safety where there were few before.

While not exactly transferrable, the data collected will also be invaluable to other sports where concussion has become an issue, especially in elite football programs where heading of the ball is a necessity, and Wayne Rooney, one of the game’s elite, resorted to some unconventional but eventually effective means – using a product by startup Storelli sports to mitigate his post-effect trauma – to dealing with a blow to the head.

The complete video on the STAR program can be seen here – the latest and boldest effort to help keep elite athletes healthy, safe and engaged.