For Parents of Girl Athletes

by RobertC3 on Feb 7, 2012 12:18 PM PST

This is more PSA than fanpost and is clearly not Sounders related, but I thought it would likely be relevant to at least a few SAH readers.

The discussion in the comments of the Super Bowl article relating to concussions in sports got me thinking about a statistic I had heard about the incidence of concussions in sport and girls’/women’s soccer having the second highest rate after football. Being the dad of a soccer playing daughter and son I thought I should dig a little deeper and see if there was more that I should know to help my children in the event of a concussion. A quick search turned up three articles of note. The first is the source of the statistic I had heard, a study published in the The American Journal of Sports Medicine.

Results:
In sum, 2651 concussions were observed in 10 926 892 athlete-exposures, with an incidence rate of 0.24 per 1000. Boys’ sports accounted for 53% of athlete-exposures and 75% of all concussions. Football accounted for more than half of all concussions, and it had the highest incidence rate (0.60). Girls’ soccer had the most concussions among the girls’ sports and the second-highest incidence rate of all 12 sports (0.35). Concussion rate increased 4.2-fold (95% confidence interval, 3.4-5.2) over the 11 years (15.5% annual increase). In similar boys’ and girls’ sports (baseball/softball, basketball, and soccer), girls had roughly twice the concussion risk of boys. Concussion rate increased over time in all 12 sports.

The second article that I thought was interesting was a piece in ESPN The Magazine on the case of a woman soccer player who returned to playing while she was still having concussion symptoms. It was really quite sobering. ESPN The Magazine

The final article was from the New York Times. It is similar to the ESPN article but addresses a broader range of sports. New York Times

Any and all are worth the time to read.

FanPosts only represent the opinions of the poster, not of Sounder at Heart.

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Comments

This doesn't surprise me

guys are built to be able to handle more physical stress them women. I’m not being sexist, it’s just that men have much more muscle then women. And here, I imagine that larger neck muscles help guys out a lot.
Concussions are seriously underrated. I wrote a fan post on the Arsenal blog, The Short Fuse, when I saw what looked like Theo Walcott getting knocked out after hitting the ground with his head. A lot of people don’t really realize that something could be wrong when the player gets back up, but it’s a serious danger/problem.

by Adnan Ilyas on Feb 7, 2012 1:36 PM PST reply actions