Hollywood Helps Keep the Concussion Conversation Going, Which Helps All Athletes

From boxing to baseball, football to hockey, there have been countless movies about sports. Whether it's the story of a long-shot athlete overcoming the odds or a team's improbable journey to the top, these movies often captivate and inspire us.

This year, however, there is a different type of sports movie showing in theaters. This movie isn't about the glory of sports, but the price some athletes pay to play them. In the film "Concussion," Will Smith portrays Dr. Bennet Omalu, a forensic pathologist who helped bring the issue of concussions to the forefront, not only in professional football, but in society as a whole.

I'll leave it to the critics to weigh in on the merits of the film's storytelling and leave it those in the audience to decide if they like the movie or not. However, as a neurologist who's dedicated so much of my career to concussion research, I appreciate the fact that Hollywood is helping to keep the concussion conversation going. This is an important topic that deserves our full attention.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, nearly 4 million people suffer concussions from sports and recreational activities each year, and since 2001, cases involving children have gone up nearly 60 percent. We know that once you sustain one concussion, you may be at a much higher risk for more. Unfortunately, we still don't fully understand the long-term impact of concussions and why they affect different people in different ways.

As the director of the Steve Tisch BrainSPORT Program at UCLA, my team and I are taking part in a landmark three-year, $30 million initiative to better understand the nature of concussions and how to best treat them. The Concussion Assessment Research and Education Grand Alliance is being funded by the NCAA and the Department of Defense.

As part of that study, we asked 22 UCLA football players to wear special helmets this season in games and in practice, designed to measure the force of impact to the head. Accelerometers placed inside the helmets detect and record impact, and if the helmets register hits with over 90 degrees of force, the trainers and medical staff are alerted. The idea is to identify players who may be at higher risk for concussions so we can evaluate them quickly and, if necessary, intervene medically.

Gathering this kind of quantifiable data is important because detecting concussions is not yet an exact science. Typically, there are no visual wounds to indicate the presence or severity of a concussion, and most of the time we rely on players to convey their symptoms to us.

We know, of course, if they are knocked unconscious or show obvious signs of dizziness.

However, most people who suffer a concussion never lose consciousness and may not have objective signs of injury but predominantly subjective symptoms. We cannot know, for example, if a player is experiencing symptoms like headaches, light sensitivity or blurred vision unless he or she tells us.

As the larger part of the CARE consortium, the Clinical Study Core, in a group of 31 universities and military academies, we will be able to gather neurological and cognitive data from more than 25,000 student-athletes in all NCAA sports. This study is already the largest prospective study of sports concussions ever, with more than 600 identified concussions.

However, in addition to neurological and cognitive data , UCLA is also part of the CARE consortium Advanced Research Core. By using specialized helmets fitted with the Head Impact Telemetry System, the staff at UCLA, along with colleagues at only three other universities, aim to better determine the effect of exposure to hits on neurocognitive function. Furthermore, this in-depth portion of the CARE concussion study will utilize pre- and post-injury blood samples and multiple post-injury brain advanced MRIs to better delineate the biological mechanisms of concussion and mild TBI.

The goal is to develop scientific, evidence-based tools to better identify the athletes who are injured and develop guidelines and equipment to better protect them. The detailed data from the ARC will let us determine when the brain is biologically recovered, allowing athletes to return to play only when the brain tells us it is ready.

Despite all the current focus on high-level sports at the collegiate and professional levels, our team wants to emphasize that the vast majority of sports concussions and brain injuries occur in youth sports. Unfortunately, public attention to concussion at different levels of sport is inversely proportional to the numbers of affected athletes. One of our main goals at the UCLA Steve Tisch BrainSPORT program is to make sure to include youth sports as a focus of prevention, outreach, research and treatment for concussions, and to consider the critical importance of an active lifestyle for long-term brain health.

It's a problem pervasive enough to inspire a Hollywood film and significant enough to deserve our best efforts to address it.

Dr. Christopher Giza leads the Pediatric TBI/Sports Concussion program at UCLA, and in 2012, he established UCLA BrainSPORT, a comprehensive sports concussion/mild TBI program to provide multidisciplinary research-based treatment for sports concussions in young athletes. Dr. Giza co-led the multidisciplinary committee that wrote the first evidence-based guidelines for management of sports concussion (from the American Academy of Neurology). He serves on the Center for Disease Control's Pediatric mild TBI committee, the NCAA Concussion Task Force, the Major League Soccer Concussion Program Committee and has served as Vice-Chair for the California State Athletic Commission. Additionally, he directs the NFL Neurological Care Program at UCLA. Aside from all the research and committees he serves on, Dr. Giza serves as a professor of Pediatric Neurology and Neurosurgery at the David Geffen School of Medicine and Mattel Children's Hospital - UCLA.