A new study conducted on an Indiana high school football team, reveals potentially worrying results – it is possible that high school kids sustain undetected or undiagnosed brain injuries in the course of play.
This could mean that kids continue to be in the sport, continue to get battered without being aware of the possible cognitive damage that could have been caused or may likely continue to be caused.
Researchers from the Purdue University examined 21 high school football players, and monitored them for an entire season. From among these 21 players, 4 players were seen as having brain impairment, in spite of never having been diagnosed with concussion.
And this brain damage was seen to be at least as bad as that of kids who had been diagnosed with episodes of concussion and who were consequently removed from play.
So these kids, whose brain damage was not diagnosed, continued to play because they were exhibiting no outward or obvious signs of having sustained any injury or damage. And according to researcher Thomas Talavage, an associate professor at the Weldon School of Biomedical Engineering at Purdue, this brain damage was actually worse than what was seen among the concussed players.