Educating Parents and Coaches About Symptoms of Concussions

Jeffrey Rosenberg, MD, Physician, Sports Medicine & Family Practice, Summit Medical Group, and Steve Adubato discuss the symptoms of a concussion and how important it is to continue educating parents, guardians and coaches about this injury.

12/15/18 #3135

 

 

 

 

Excerpt:

"We're joined by Jeff Rosenberg, Dr. Jeff Rosenberg, Physician of Sports Medicine and Family Practice at Summit Medical Group. Good to see you, doctor. Thank you for having me. Let's talk concussions. Okay. You know, we were talking right before going on the air that one of our boys is dealing with that right now... is concussion protocol. Uh-huh. Our daughter plays soccer... one of the girls on her team... concussion... concussion protocol... What's a concussion? What's the protocol? And why does it matter? So, a concussion itself is injury to the brain and to the skull. Although, you can have them from just a collision, where you don't have an actual hit to the head... like a whiplash injury from a car. But it's an injury to the brain that affects the way the brain functions and affects the blood flow into the brain which are one of the reasons why recovery is so hard. But anybody who's had kind of a collision or a head injury, and then has a group of symptoms, which usually include headaches, but also going to have physical symptoms like nausea or dizziness, you know, being really tired and wanting to sleep all the time, having problems in school, as far as concentration or focus or memory, and there's also a lot of psychological impact, including some depression or anxiety that often will kick in with folks who have concussions. How many kids are we talking about? We think about 50,000 concussions a year occur in kids under... occur under the age of 20 from sports and you know, play. Nationwide, it's more about 3 million altogether, when you count adults as well, with work injuries and car accidents. Does everyone get treated in some emergency room or some medical facility? Hopefully not. Most people have simple concussions where they don't feel great, but they're not in a severe neurological status, can usually stay home. Go into the emergency room, the usual advice is a CAT scan, which you may or may not really need, but is useful if there is worsening symptoms. So if you are kind of feeling pretty well but within a few hours you get really sleepy, to the point where you can't wake up or you're really confused, you don't remember things, or if there's persistent vomiting, those would all be reasons where a visit to the emergency room would be very useful. So, what's the protocol? Because I know our... my son had to go through a whole bunch of tests... Yeah. ...over a period of time. He's in the middle of it as we're speaking. Yes. But what is it? Well, the protocol that most athletes deal with is once..."