With the dog days of summer come concussions. And with concussions come research!

I think of August as the ‘lull before the storm’:  with the dog days of summer come two-a-days in American football.  Around the country, the school  fields fill with kids playing the most popular contact sport in the U.S.:  football, to an American; ‘gridiron football’ to the rest of the world.

And with these days we begin, in our clinics, to see a steady, inexorable rise in the number of concussions to be evaluated. By mid-September, we can’t seem to open enough clinic space to see everyone clamoring to get in.

Last year, at this time, I wrote a post on the freely available concussion offerings we have at CJSM, and I am re-posting that entry(see what follows this new entry, below) for folks to read and see what we have in store when you visit the main website.

Over the past year, we have published many additional research articles, some of which are in the print queue and only available on line.  I wanted to draw your attention to a couple of those offerings, as they have real, clinical impact on the way we may practice.

The authors Carrie Rahn, Barry Munkasy, Barry Joyner et al.  looked at the BESS test as performed on the sideline of actual events, and found that the test performance deteriorated when compared to more controlled environments.  They conclude that ” Clinicians need to consider the role of the local environment when performing the BESS test and should perform postinjury tests in the same environment as the baseline test.”

And a very interesting article with a group of authors including Bob Cantu and Chris Nowinski looked at the efficacy of concussion education programs and determined:  “Preseason concussion knowledge was not significantly associated with in-season reporting behavior. Intention to report concussion symptoms was significantly related to in-season reporting behavior.”   Important to the understanding of this article is their discussion on the psychosocial construct of ‘reporting intention.’  As ever, one finds in the realm of public health that education alone is unlikely to alter behavior.

Read these studies: “Sideline Performance of the Balance Error Scoring System During a Live Sporting Event” and  “Concussion Reporting Intention:  A Valuable Metric for Predicting Reporting Behavior and Evaluating Concussion Education,” by Emily Kroshus, Christine Baugh, Daniel Daneshvar, et al.

There’s a lot to learn!