Englewood Hospital to host concussion seminar
ENGLEWOOD – Englewood Hospital and Medical Center will host a free concussion clinic on Aug. 3 for parents, coaches and students involved with youth athletics to educate them on the signs and dangers of concussions sustained during play.
The clinic will be held in the Chiang Auditorium from 6:30 p.m. to 8 p.m. at the hospital, and will feature experts from the Concussion Treatment Center discussing the nature of the injury, as well as treatments and warning signs to look out for.
The seminar will be presented by Board Certified Sport Medicine specialist Dr. Thomas Bottiglieri of Professional Sports Medicine Associates in Englewood, and other presenters will include Dr. David Istvan, chief of Emergency Medicine for the Department of Rehabilitation Medicine, and NFL players Bruce Harper and Harry Carson.
“We’re going over recognition of concussion, why it’s important to have athletes evaluated, and discuss return-to-play protocols,” Bottiglieri said.
The long term effects of concussions, he said, are now thought to be the result of athletes returning to play too soon after the initial injury, and before they have been allowed to heal sufficiently. The recovery time for a concussion varies based on the individual and the severity of the injury, he said, but the guidelines practiced up until the last few years used a standard amount of time without considering those factors.
“We want to make sure that student-athletes are properly evaluated and managed so that they don’t get back on the field too soon and suffer a second or a third injury while their brain is still not healed from the first,” he said.
The biggest change in the treatment of concussions, he said, is an individualized approach. The American Academy of Neurology’s 1997 guidelines, he said, stated that it would take seven days to recover from the first concussion. More recently, three international consensus statements, the latest from Prague, promote individualized treatment for return-to-play guidelines.
Bottiglieri said any sport that has the risk of running into other players carries the risk of a concussion. The biggest risks, he said, were high-contact sports such as football and hockey, but other sports such as soccer, baseball and wrestling also carry a risk.
“It doesn’t have to be a direct contact to the head,” he said, “A sufficient blow to the body will do it.”
For treatment of possible concussions, Bottiglieri said the most important thing is to take complaints seriously.
“If a kid is complaining of headache, dizziness, nausea, difficulty focusing, fogginess, feeling off balance, those complaints should be taken very seriously, and that athlete should be evaluated before he’s allowed to return to play, or she’s allowed to return to play,” he said.
In addition, he said, the coaches need to know the athlete’s baseline, so that they can determine when they’re “not themselves.”
One of the issues facing treatment of concussions in youths, he said, is that there is not sufficient normative data as there is with adults. Though there are efforts being made, and new programs being developed, to create such a baseline, this lack of data makes it difficult to diagnose concussions in young people. Additionally, behavioral changes that can result from brain trauma can often be attributed to other factors, and thus go undiagnosed.
Additionally, he said, a young, developing brain is more at risk when faced with this type of injury, because there’s less understood about how they respond to injury.
“The biggest complaint I get from parents and coaches is, ‘Well, when we played, it wasn’t such a big deal. Why is it such a big deal now?’” he said. “People want their kids to be tough, and that’s understandable. The thing I always say is, when we played, we did feel headaches, we did have dizziness, we did have those issues and we lied about it and we continued to play. And some of us ended up with post-concussive syndrome, and had long-term effects related to those injuries.”
“Post-concussion syndrome is a serious medical condition that should not be ignored,” Dr. Gary Alweiss, section chief of Neurology at Englewood Hospital and Medical Center, said. “In addition, these symptoms become exacerbated with a second or third concussion, increasing the risk of more permanent damage.”
The changes in the brain that come as a result of concussions and post-concussion syndrome are similar to those caused by Alzheimers and Parkinson’s Disease, he said.
“Our role, right now, is to raise awareness of the problem, so that we can safely have kids participate in sports,” he said. “So we stop ignoring headaches and dizziness, and saying that somebody ‘got their bell rung,’ and get those kids off the field and evaluated appropriately.”
Currently, Bottiglieri said, there’s a “gap” in sports treatment for youths. While college and high school sporting programs have trainers on staff to work with the students and assess and treat injuries, youth sports in middle schools and below very rarely have trained medical professionals available.
With programs like the seminar, he said, the hospital is looking to “fill in the gap,” and raise awareness, so that youth organizations have the student athletes evaluated before play starts so they have a baseline to measure against when and if a student is injured.