Concussion Experts Pick Apart The Myth That Cycling Is More Dangerous Than Football

The thought that bicycling competence be some-more dangerous than football crept behind into a inhabitant alertness this week after an NFL-affiliated alloy named Joseph Maroon

“It’s many some-more dangerous roving a bike or a skateboard than personification girl football,” pronounced Maroon, who is a consultant to a NFL’s Head, Neck and Spine Committee and a Pittsburgh Steelers’ group neurosurgeon.

Listen to a full talk here. (Source: SoundCloud)

It’s a extraordinary claim, generally deliberation a number of relatives who fear a outcome football could have on their children

“In some aspects, this is comparing apples to oranges,” Christopher Giza, a highbrow of pediatric neurology and neurosurgery during a UCLA Brain Injury Research Center, said.

While bicycling and football both have a intensity for dire mind damage (TBI), he said, “the magnitude and astringency and a relations risks are all somewhat different.”

“It’s formidable to review damage risk of personification football to roving a bike or a skateboard,” concluded Kevin M. Guskiewicz, a heading concussion researcher from a University of North Carolina during Chapel Hill and a co-director of a Matthew Gfeller Sport-Related Traumatic Brain Injury Research Center.

Christopher Nowinski, a co-founder and executive executive of a Sports Legacy Institute, a nonprofit investigate classification dedicated to a sports concussion crisis, took a stronger position when asked about a bicycling-to-football comparison, job a explain “false” in an email.

“It is hapless that this critical information is being miscommunicated in a media,” Nowinski wrote.

Both Nowinski and Tom Farrey, a executive executive of a Sports Society Program during a Aspen Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based educational and process studies organization, cited information from a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that tracked mind injuries

According to a CDC, bicycling does lead to some-more annual TBIs than all other activities for children 19 and younger, usually hardly commanding football. But mangle down those totals by gender, and you’ll remember something important: Young women don’t play tackle football really often.

If we take a demeanour during a masculine numbers, you’ll notice something else: Football accounts for a many puncture room visits for all males between a ages of 10 and 19.

Injuries postulated while biking or during a stadium send boys underneath 10 to a puncture room some-more mostly than football-related injuries — though that’s expected since children mostly don’t start personification tackle football until a age of 10 or so, Farrey and Nowinski noted. Consider a series of people who bike compared to play tackle football, and a inequality unexpected looks even some-more stark.

Football players also have to fastener with a series of neurological concerns that cyclists do not. Players might censor or not know how to scrupulously brand concussion symptoms. A 2014 investigate from Harvard University and Boston University researchers estimated that college football players knowledge six suspected concussions for each one that is indeed diagnosed

Another care is how mostly a standard football actor suffers poignant — if not concussion-causing — hits to a head. Even during a girl level, in a singular deteriorate a football actor might take hundreds of hits to a conduct during magnitudes that can review to those in college. The long-term effects of these subconcussive blows are not entirely known, though there is a flourishing physique of research to suggest

“Riding a bike or a skateboard are not famous to means hundreds of impacts to a conduct in a year,” Nowinski said.

When we reached out to a NFL for comment, the joining destined us to comments done Wednesday

“Joe Maroon doesn’t pronounce for a NFL, nor we for him,” Miller pronounced when asked about Maroon’s outline of a NFL’s mind mishap problem as “over-exaggerated.”

But Farrey from a Aspen Institute remarkable that NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell’s wife, Jane Skinner, said in 2013NFL-affiliatednot usually accurate, though “nothing new.”

“The NFL is doing a lot of good work in terms of training coaches and reforming a game,” Farrey said. “But if they’re going to make genuine progress, they’re going to have to start revelation relatives a truth.”

“If we distortion to mothers, they don’t forget it and they don’t pardon it,” he added.

Another chairman who disagrees with a thought that football is safer than bicycling: Chris Borland. The former San Francisco 49ers linebacker late progressing this week after usually one deteriorate in a league, citing mind trauma-related concerns — that is since Maroon was brought onto a NFL Network for his talk in a initial place.

“You can float a bicycle and a act of roving a bicycle isn’t causing mind trauma,” Borland told “CBS This Morning”

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Article source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/03/20/football-biking-bicycling-nfl_n_6909714.html?utm_hp_ref=chicago&ir=Chicago