Concussion Research Offerings on CJSM

We’ve been profiling sports-related concussions (SRCs) in the August posts here on the CJSM blog.

We’ve taken a peek at the use of computerized neurocognitive tests in the diagnosis and management of SRCs; conducted a poll on the entity known as “Second Impact Syndrome”; and interviewed Dr. Jason Mihalik of the University of North Carolina, who is one of the principal developers of a celebrated app helping laypeople identify when an athlete might be concussed.

In this post, I wanted to alert the readership to a special set of journal articles CJSM is releasing for free for a limited time, a set devoted to this issue of SRCs.

No, that’s not “Big Brother,”
that’s the CJSM Editor-in-Chief,
Christopher Hughes MBBS, MSc

Our Editor-in-Chief, Dr. Chris Hughes, describes the special collection of ten journal articles in this YouTube video.

I am very excited to pass this information on to the readership, as I am sure you will find this collection quite interesting.  The articles range from the Zurich 2012 Consensus Statement to insightful offerings on the use of neuropsychological tests and the risk of chronic neurological impairment from SRCs.  Not only are the offerings diverse but, to repeat, they are freely available for a limited time.

I plan to return to the specific issue of the use of computerized neurocognitive tests in the diagnosis and management of SRCs in the next blog post.  I had broached this subject in my August 5 post.  My clinical group has been busy doing literally hundreds of baseline tests prior to and at the beginning of the American fall sports seasons.  It is a big business, quite frankly, and I have some concerns about the clinical utility of these tests.  I certainly appreciate them as one tool to use among others; but in America, at least, their routine use–their de facto emergence as standard of care–has given me some pause.  So, though I may be dipping my toes into the waters of controversy, I will be critically looking at the use of these instruments in my next post.

I will be looking specifically at the Ian Shrier, M.D., Ph.D. study in the CJSM concussion collection  and a new and excellent article on the reliability of computerized neurocognitive tests from the Archives of Clinical Neuropsychology:  ”Test-retest Reliability of Four Computerized Neurocognitive Assessment Tools in an Active Duty Military Population.” 

Won’t you look at them too so we can engage in an on-line conversation?  As ever, I stay busy responding to the comments on this blog, as well as chatting with you on Twitter and Facebook.

Until next time, stay well!