NFL Funds Concussion Research

With the help of a grant of $100, 000, the intersection of football and concussion will be studied at the Concussion Management Clinic in the Department of Orthopaedics in the University at Buffalo (UB) School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences. The question to be answered is: when can an athlete who has had a concussion safely return to play.

The award is given by NFL Charities, the charitable foundation of the National Football League owners, who are seeking the most objective, scientific method of determining when an athlete who has had a concussion can play the game again. The grant to UB is one of 15 totaling $1.5 million that NFL Charities is providing to researchers nationwide to support sports-related medical research on concussion/traumatic brain injury and cardiovascular medicine.

“Concussion itself poses little risk if it is properly managed; the only risk acutely is hemorrhage, which is generally detected through CT scans, ” said John Leddy, M.D., director of UB’s Concussion Management Clinic. “However, return to play before complete recovery involves much more serious risk. Therefore, it is important that a systematic, scientifically based return-to-play protocol be established and that it is proven to be valid and reliable. This is what we will be doing with this grant.”

At present team physicians often rely on subjective assessments of an athlete’s ability to play without experiencing symptoms. Over the next 18 months, the UB researchers will test between 35 and 50 athletes from the Buffalo Bills, the Buffalo Sabres and athletes from Western New York colleges, including UB, who sustain concussions in the 2012-2013 season, as well as healthy control subjects.