Neuropsychological effects of repeated head Impacts in freestyle aerial ski jumping
(Neurophysiologische Auswirkungen wiederholten Aufschlagens des Kopfes beim Ski-Freestyle)
An evaluation of the cognitive abilities of athletes on the US Freestyle Aerial team was performed to assess the effect of head impacts over the course of a jumping season. Aerial jumping has been previously shown to have a relatively high incidence of head impact, or slapbacks, during the course of training and competition. While individual impacts do not typically result in apparent injury, the cumulative effect of multiple impacts on brain injury is not known. Ten World Cup athletes participated in the study, and were evaluated pre- and post season using a standard battery of neuropsychological tests. Several training and competition sessions were monitored to assess the individual slapback frequency for each athlete in the study as well as for other athletes. Slapback incidence was approximately 8% of total jumps, significantly lower than in our previous study. These differences are attributed to the skill level of the athletes in the current study. Pre- and post season neuropsychological testing did not demonstrate any significant reduction in scores on tests for information processing rate, attention and concentration, and memory for any of the athletes tested. Five of the ten athletes had at least one major impact during the season that led to a diagnosis of concussion. None of these athletes demonstrated residual effects from those impacts that affected their test scores. Continued and expanded testing using both neuropsychological tests and postural stability tests in subsequent years and in the immediate period following a major impact using the results of this study as a baseline for each athlete may be useful in determining the long term effects of multiple head impacts as well as for guidelines for return to practice following a head injury.
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| Notationen: | Biowissenschaften und Sportmedizin technische Sportarten |
| Sprache: | Englisch |
| Online-Zugang: | http://www.nisss.org/skihead.htm |
| Dokumentenarten: | elektronische Publikation |
| Level: | hoch |