Source: usnews.com | Repost Duerson Fund 6/1/2022 –
Outdoor sports season is nearly here, and with rough play comes the risk of concussion.
But one of the most-used tools to assess sports-related concussion from the sidelines isn’t as precise as one might like, a new study argues.
Intense exertion from playing sports could cause some of the symptoms listed on the Sports Concussion Assessment Tool-3rd Edition (SCAT3), researchers found in a study of rugby players.
“Some of them can have a high symptom severity score which is not related to a head impact,” said lead researcher Stephanie Iring, a doctoral student at Rutgers University Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences in Newark, N.J. “It’s related more to the fatigue that they experience or other bodily injury that they might have experienced.”
Headache-related symptoms were most strongly associated with an actual concussion, Iring and her colleagues found.
Other symptoms measured by the SCAT3 — fatigue or neck pain, for example — are less strongly linked to a concussion and could owe simply to exertion, the results showed.