The White House and President Obama held a first-ever Healthy Kids & Safe Sports Concussion Summit.
The Summit held on Thursday, May 30th, 2014, was attended by a group of athletes, coaches and medical experts.
Included in the reasoning for the Summit were the obvious points: the developments in the NFL, and Obama’s previous mention of concern that his own daughters play sports (at least for one daughter that’s soccer, with girls’ soccer of note the second-highest incidence of concussion, followed only by the most notorious: football). But the president had a personal admission:
“When I was young and played football briefly, there were a couple of times where I’m sure that that ringing sensation in my head and the need to sit down for a while might have been a mild concussion,” the president said at Thursday’s White House Healthy Kids & Safe Sports Concussion Summit.
“At the time you didn’t think anything of it. [And] the awareness is improved today, but not by much. So the total number of young people who are impacted by this early on is probably bigger than we know.”
Revelations at the Summit included the fact that it isn’t just professional athletes who are victims of concussions. More than 140,000 high schoolers suffer concussions each year.
Among the developments spurred in part by the Summit, it was announced that:
- The NCAA and the Department of Defense are jointly launching a $30 million effort to fund the most comprehensive clinical study of concussion and head impact exposure ever conducted.
- The NFL is committing $25 million over the next three years to support projects and partnerships aimed at promoting youth sports safety, including support for new pilot programs to expand access to athletic trainers in school.
- The National Institutes of Health is announcing the launch of a new longitudinal research effort to detect, characterize, and measure the chronic effects of repetitive concussions to inform clinical trials aimed at preventing or slowing disease progression in the future.
- The UCLA Steve Tisch BrainSPORT Program, with a $10 million investment from Steve Tisch, and UCLA’s Departments of Neurosurgery and Pediatrics will launch the UCLA Steve Tisch BrainSPORT Program to target sports concussion prevention, outreach, research and treatment for athletes of all ages, especially youth.
- The National Institute of Standards and Technology will invest $5 million over five years as part of the Materials Genome Initiative, to work on tools to accelerate the development of advanced materials that can provide better protection against concussions for the athlete, the warfighter and others.
- Pop Warner Little Scholars will participate this season in a research project modeled on the High School RIO reporting system, which tracks concussions and concussion trends in high school sports, to improve tracking of concussions among young athletes.
- The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia will launch a comprehensive pediatric and adolescent concussion registry to enable CHOP researchers to assess data for thousands of children with concussions to improve understanding of concussions and their impact on child health.
Extensive educational initiatives were also announced. They include seminars, research and other initiatives by Safe Kids Worldwide, USA Cheer, U.S. Soccer and Major League Soccer, The National Federation of State High School Associations, The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and The American Academy of Neurology, Pop Warner Little Scholars and The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP). ANA surgeons have also been trained and practiced at CHOP.
At ANA, we are very invested and proactive regarding concussion treatment. In keeping with our network of collaborative specialists, we will assist patients with concussion issues. Call or contact us today.
ANA is a team of expert neurosurgeons and medical professionals, who combine their decades of knowledge to provide information, events, and articles on a range of neurological conditions.
