This Article  • Full text  • PDF  • Send to a friend  • Save in My Folder  • Save to citation manager  • Permissions  Citing Articles  • Contact me when this article is cited  Related Content  • Similar articles in JAMA  Topic Collections  • Injury Prevention & Control  • Evidence-Based Medicine  • Sports Medicine  • Statistics and Research Methods  • Neurology  • Alert me on articles by topic

Mike Mitka

JAMA. 2007;298:1265-1266.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text and any section headings.

Put a bunch of football players on the gridiron, and sooner or later someone will receive a concussion. What happens next—treatment and recovery—remains an inexact science.

Understanding of concussion (also known as mild traumatic brain injury) and other sports-related head injuries is still growing. Diagnosis, treatment, and rehabilitation protocols remain in question because of a lack of rigorous trial data. Among the basic issues still unresolved are how to define concussion.

While concussions will probably always be a part of football, proper tackling technique, leading with the shoulder instead of the helmet, can help reduce the incidence. (Photo credit: Daniel Padavona/iStockphoto.com)

An estimated 300 000 sports-related concussions occur annually in the United States. Researchers estimate that almost 63 000 of those concussions occur at the high school level, with football accounting for 63% of all such injuries (Powell JW and Barber-Foss KD. JAMA. 1999;282[10]:958-963). A study of . . . [Full Text of this Article]

NEW TECHNOLOGY