April 29, 2024, TORONTO 鈥� from 91亚色鈥檚 Faculty of Health may offer reassuring news for parents whose children have a history of concussion, but want to get back to playing sports. Researchers from 91亚色鈥檚 Faculty of Health spent more than a decade scouting fields, rinks and courts across the Greater Toronto Area for participants with a history of concussion and tested their performance on complex eye-hand coordination tasks, finding that age and previous sports experience were larger factors in cognitive-motor integration than a history of multiple concussions. 

鈥淚n previous work, we've already shown that kids who have any number of concussions perform worse than children who've never had a concussion, but we did notice there was this subgroup of kids who seemed to perform motor skills just fine within weeks of getting a concussion,鈥� says School of Kinesiology and Health Science Prof.. 鈥淲hat we found here suggests that previous sports experience may offer some neuroprotective benefits against the effects of concussion.鈥� 

The 91亚色 researchers, including Sergio and first author 91亚色 PhD candidate Nicole Smeha, recruited 223 individuals for the study who have a previous history of concussion and gave them a standard task to perform and a more complex one. While the study mostly looked at children and youth playing hockey, soccer, football and basketball, there were a smaller number of 鈥渂eer league鈥� adult participants included in the research, with the youngest participant being nine and the oldest 53, with experience also being the more important factor with older players. They also looked at sex, but did not find it to be a significant factor, says Sergio, also the 91亚色 Research Chair in Brain Health and Gender in Action.

鈥淥ur hypothesis was that a higher number of concussions would be the largest factor for cognitive-motor integration, but after analyzing the results we realized there were likely stronger factors at play,鈥� says Smeha. 

Concussions, a form of brain injury, are a complex health issue with most concussions sustained in youth and adolescents under the age of 18. Research shows concussion can lead to deficits in cognitive and motor function, including slower processing speed, increased reaction time, slower upper limb velocity and poorer accuracy. While further injury is a risk, Sergio says that the takeaway message is that multiple factors need to be considered when deciding whether and when to put a kid back into sports after a concussion. 

鈥淚f your child has had a second concussion, and they're new to sports, they might be more vulnerable to getting hurt again, because they're not going to be able to perform at the same level, whereas if your kid is playing at a higher level, yes, they鈥檝e still suffered a brain injury, but the neural network controlling movement may be more resilient.鈥� 

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TORONTO, April 4, 2019 鈥�听More years in sports 鈥� not less 鈥� may help protect the brains of children who have had a concussion, against future concussions, a new study says.

Research from 91亚色鈥檚 Faculty of Health found that children who have played in a performance sport for at least seven years, and have a history of concussion, recover better from concussions than children who have fewer years in the sport. Their years in the sport may give them more skill-related motor 鈥渞eserve鈥� that helps them to get back to the level they were playing at previously.

鈥淥ur results suggest there鈥檚 an advantage to staying with skilled activity to the point where your brain can maintain performance even when it's still being affected in subtle ways by a past injury,鈥� says senior author, Lauren Sergio, professor in the School of Kinesiology and Health Science and Centre for Vision Research at 91亚色. 鈥淭his performance may be protective and would reduce vulnerability to another concussion when playing with non-concussed peers.鈥�

and her former postdoctoral student and lead author, Marc Dalecki, now an assistant professor in the School of Kinesiology at Louisiana State University, along with co-author听 professor in 91亚色鈥檚 School of Kinesiology & Health Science, examined factors that may influence performance recovery after a concussion.

鈥淭he findings of this study are important because it demonstrates that athletes with more years of experience return to pre-concussion levels more quickly than inexperienced athletes,鈥� says Macpherson. 鈥淭his can be one factor to help guide decisions about returning athletes to play.鈥�

Their study looked at 126 youth, aged eight to 17 years old, 64 with a history of concussion and 62 without, over a two-year period from 2013 to 2015. Participants, parents, team managers, and coaches were interviewed in order to obtain detailed information about the concussion history. All concussion history participants were defined as 鈥渁symptomatic鈥� in accordance with current return-to-play protocol guidelines at the time of testing. Participants were asked to perform two visuomotor tasks over 20 trials that required sliding the index finger of the dominant hand along a dual-touch screen laptop, with touch screens in the vertical and horizontal planes.

In the first condition, they moved their hand on the vertical screen in the same direction as the target on the screen. In the second condition, participants had to slide their finger along the horizontal touch screen in the opposite direction of a presented target on the screen. In other words, in order to move the cursor to the left, they had to slide their finger to the right. This type of condition is similar to passing a hockey puck to a teammate on the left while skating to the right.

Researchers found youth with a concussion history with seven or more years of sport experience and higher levels of eye鈥搇imb coordination-related sport experience had quicker motor skill recovery times (around 12 months) compared to their peers with less than six years of sport experience (around 30 months or two seasons later). They found no differences in these results when factoring sex or age.

The study is published in the

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Anjum Nayyar, 91亚色 Media Relations, 416-736-2100 ext. 44543,听anayyar@yorku.ca

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