UNM’s Brain Safe team is now waiting on the New Mexico Legislature to decide whether the project will be funded further, allowing them to expand their research to other campuses, said project director Kent Kiehl.
According to a press release, Brain Safe aims “to study and minimize the impact of brain injury on NCAA athletes in contact sports.” More than 200 athletes from UNM will receive MRI scans to study “brain structure, chemistry, connectivity and function at the beginning of every season,” according to the release.
“We are in a process of talking with several other universities about adopting the same program. It has not been adopted as full yet but we are optimistic that by next year we will have several other schools having the same program,” Kiehl said.
As part of the contract with the University, the organization performs comprehensive brain health checkups of all athletes at the beginning of the school year. If an athlete gets a concussion at any point during the year, he or she returns to the institution for MRI scans to determine whether there are any relevant changes to help players and coaches make decisions during play.
Last year the research yielded some interesting results. According to the researchers, 56 percent of the 260 athletes who had been tested had abnormalities, referred to as incidental findings. However, the number of athletes with incidental findings has been stable so far.
So far, the program is focused on athletes involved in contact sports. The researchers are scanning the brains of men’s basketball, football, soccer, diving and baseball players, as well as athletes from the women’s basketball, volleyball, soccer, and diving teams, and men and women from the UNM cheer squad. Funding from the state will help the researchers extend the program to other schools.
Someday we might be able to offer it to parents whose kids are participating in the contact sports,” Kheil said.
The Centers for Disease Control have estimated that there were approximately 300,000 sports-related traumatic brain injuries across the country in 2006. These numbers only include those who lost consciousness, accounting for only 10 to 20 percent of total sports-related traumatic brain injuries.
Brain injuries in sports are a major issue and many researchers and organizations across the U.S. are doing research to understand the long-term effects of such injuries.
The National Institutes of Health are also funding eight projects to receive support to answer some of the most fundamental problems on traumatic brain injury, including understanding long-term effects of repeated head injuries and improving diagnosis of concussions, according to a press release issued by NIH.
The funding is provided by the Sports and Health Research Program, a partnership between the NIH, the NFL, and the Foundation for the National Institutes of Health, according to the statement.
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“We need to be able to predict which patterns of injury are rapidly reversible and which are not. This program will help researchers get closer to answering some of the important questions about concussion for our youth who play sports and their parents,” said Story Landis, Ph.D., director of the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, which is part of NIH.
The state legislature will decide the future of UNM’s Brain Safe program during the 60-day session which began Tuesday.
UNM’s Brain Safe is a collaboration between the University and the Mind Research Network. The project began to scan the brains of Lobo athletes in 2013, and since October 2014, the project has not found evidence of any serious brain injuries.
Sayyed Shah is the assistant news editor at the Daily Lobo. He can be contacted at assistant-news@dailylobo.com or on Twitter @mianfawadshah.
