iStockphoto
It’s pretty wild how long the NFL tried to pretend there’s nothing particularly dangerous about incredibly tall men bumping into each other at high speeds and then lying motionless on the ground at regular intervals, especially when you consider it took years to investigate. about the long-term consequences of head trauma.
Of course, the league wasn’t the only organization that liked to prioritize highlights over the health of its players, as ESPN had no qualms about celebrating hits in the “Jacked Up!” segment that quietly disappeared from the network after talks about concussion and CTE became too loud to ignore.
In 2015, a study of the brains of more than 90 former NFL players who donated the organ to researchers after their death found that 96% of them showed evidence of CTE, and there are many horror stories about athletes dealing with it. the devastating impact of the brutal impacts they have been exposed to over the course of their careers.
The football world has made progress in tackling the problem in recent years as leagues have cracked down on blows to the head and instituted concussion protocols. Companies have also continued to refine helmet designs to make the game safer, and a few years ago a group of high school students even developed a way to detect concussions the moment they occur.
Now there is a new device on the market poised to become a literal game changer when it comes to contact sports, as the FDA recently announced that it has approved the Q-Collar, a device that was designed by a group of doctors over the course of seven years who appear to be able to dramatically reduce head trauma while wearing.
While the research that led to its creation may have been quite complex, the Q-Collar itself is quite simple: it’s a ring you wear around your neck that “ exerts a pressure force that increases blood volume to move. of the brain “referred to as” sloshing “- to minimize the impact of hitting the skull.
The Q-Collar has been at the center of a number of clinical studies, and in the study that led to FDA approval, 77% of the 145 high school soccer players who assisted in the testing did not experience major changes in the test. ” white matter areas “of the brain compared to the 73% of noncarriers in whom” significant changes “in the tissue were detected after undergoing MRI.
Clearly, there is still a lot of work to be done in this area, because unlike Rob Gronkowski, you would be led to believe that there is currently no effective way to drastically reduce the symptoms of CTE afterwards. With that said, you can only hope this is a big step in the right direction.