Kids’ ER concussion visits up 60 pct over decade

MIKE STOBBE

AP Med­ical Writer

ATLANTA — The num­ber of ath­letic chil­dren going to hos­pi­tals with con­cus­sions is up 60 per­cent in the past decade, a find­ing that is likely due to par­ents and coaches being more care­ful about treat­ing head injuries, accord­ing to a new fed­eral study.

“It’s a good increase, if that makes any sense,” said Steve Mar­shall, interim direc­tor of the Uni­ver­sity of North Carolina’s Injury Pre­ven­tion and Research Center.

“These injuries were always there. It’s not that there are more injuries now. It’s just that now peo­ple are get­ting treat­ment that they weren’t get­ting before,” said Mar­shall, who was not involved in the new research.

Bicy­cling and foot­ball were the lead­ing rea­sons for the kids’ brain injuries, but health offi­cials said that could be at least partly related to the pop­u­lar­ity of those activ­i­ties. For exam­ple, it’s pos­si­ble many more kids bike, so a larger num­ber of bike-related injuries would be expected.

The Cen­ters for Dis­ease Con­trol and Pre­ven­tion study is based on a sur­vey of 66 hos­pi­tal emer­gency depart­ments that was designed to be nation­ally rep­re­sen­ta­tive. The CDC looked at non-fatal data for the years 2001 through 2009 for kids and teens ages 19 and younger.

The agency looked at trau­matic brain injuries, a cat­e­gory of injuries that mostly counts con­cus­sions but also includes skull frac­tures and bleed­ing in the brain.

The esti­mated num­bers of kids com­ing into ERs with these brain injuries rose dra­mat­i­cally, about 153,000 in 2001 to nearly 250,000 in 2009. The rate also rose, also by about 60 percent.

How­ever, there was not a sig­nif­i­cant increase in the rate of kids who were imme­di­ately admit­ted to the main hos­pi­tal for fur­ther treat­ment. That sug­gests that more so than in the past, more coaches and par­ents have been bring­ing kids to the ER with mild con­cus­sions and blows to the head, said Dr. Julie Gilchrist, a CDC epi­demi­ol­o­gist who led the study.

That’s prob­a­bly due to more aware­ness of the for­merly under-appreciated long-term haz­ards of con­cus­sions, she added.

In 2003, the CDC started a “Heads Up” youth con­cus­sion aware­ness cam­paign tar­get­ing doc­tors. Since then, the agency has expanded the focus to coaches and school officials.

That effort was bol­stered by a series of stud­ies that began to appear around 2005 that showed dam­age in the brains of for­mer National Foot­ball League play­ers. Media cov­er­age of such stud­ies has inten­si­fied in the past four years, too, with reports focus­ing not only on foot­ball play­ers but also the actress Natasha Richard­son, who died in 2009 from a brain injury from a ski­ing accident.

At the Uni­ver­sity of Rochester Med­ical Cen­ter in New York state, nearly all of the kids who come in with con­cus­sions are brought in by their par­ents. Such vis­its have been increas­ing, and many par­ents seem to have become aware of the dan­ger of con­cus­sions by reports on tele­vi­sion, said Dr. Jef­frey Bazar­ian, an emer­gency physi­cian there.

“I think the TV spe­cials on this have them spooked,” he said.

Par­ents may also be moti­vated by recently passed state laws in New York and else­where that require stu­dent ath­letes with con­cus­sion symp­toms to be cleared by a med­ical pro­fes­sional before being allowed to par­tic­i­pate in sports, Bazar­ian said.

In 2011, bills were intro­duced in at least 39 states that were aimed at bet­ter man­age­ment of trau­matic brain injuries, and most tar­geted sports-related con­cus­sions in youths, accord­ing to the National Con­fer­ence of State Legislatures.

Other high­lights from the CDC study:

—About 70 per­cent of the ER vis­its were by boys.

—About 70 per­cent were kids ages 10 to 19.

—Younger kids com­monly got their injuries on the play­ground or from bik­ing. Older kids were more likely to get them from sports, with foot­ball being the lead­ing source for brain injuries in older boys, and bik­ing, soc­cer and bas­ket­ball for older girls.

—The esti­mated num­ber of trau­matic brain injuries in ath­letic kids held about steady from 2001 to 2004, but then shot up after­ward, ris­ing most dra­mat­i­cally from 2008 to 2009.

—Over­all, about 15 per­cent of such trau­matic brain injuries each year was from bicy­cling, on aver­age, mak­ing that the lead­ing cause. Foot­ball was a close second.

Health offi­cials have long advo­cated the use of bicy­cle hel­mets as a way to reduce the sever­ity of head injuries, but hel­met use dropped after the early 1990s and has been hold­ing at a fairly low rate for more than a decade. About 85 per­cent of youths say they rarely or never wear a bicy­cle hel­met, accord­ing to one gov­ern­ment survey.

Posted by AP News on Oct 8 2011. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.