Michigan High School Athletic Association Concussion Report - 2015-16

During the

2015

-16

school

year, the Michigan High School Athletic Association conducted an unprecedented study of head injury

report

s from its member

school

s, designed to further quantify and reduce future incidents of such injuries. Mandatory

report

ing came from 99 percent of

high

schools and found that there were 4,452

concussion

s during the past school year at an average of 5.9 per school or 1.6 per thousand participants. The Association anticipates that various groups will study the data to apply it to the teams and rules of the game designed to make the competition safer and it will work as well. with the Michigan State University Youth Sports Institute to develop coach education programs around results, this will allow us for the first time to establish benchmarks by which we can measure our year-over-year progress in reducing injuries in the head in all school sports and will help us raise questions we will seek answers to with our research pa athletes across the state and perhaps the nation two-thirds of verified

concussion

s occurred in-competition twenty-eight percent of concussed athletes returned to play between six and ten days and another twenty percent required 11 to 15 days of rest.

Perhaps most interesting was the fact that head injuries sustained by girls and boys in the same sport had a wide disparity in soccer 30 girls per thousand compared to 18 per thousand for boys in basketball 29 per m il four girls eleven thousand for boys and softball players reported eleven concussions per thousand four per thousand for baseball, we hope to identify the physiological, social or psychological factors that contribute to this disparity and to the reporting of head injuries by children and girls, and we want to use the answers to these questions to better prepare school staff, especially coaches who may be coaching girls who are over-reporting or boys under-reporting in competitive interest clastic

athletic

s record-breaking soccer suffered the most vaalu concussions for ice hockey eight player soccer girls soccer and girls basketball collection is underway for the new school year part of a sustained comprehensive program of concussion care by the mhsaa is also running the program of largest side concussion testing in the country and was l The first statewide

association

to provide

high

school participants with concussion gap insurance designed to pay deductibles and copays that other policies don't.

We're tackling education and screening and aftercare in unprecedented ways. We're proud to what we have done but we are far from satisfied, we will continually be looking for ways to make school sports even safer than they already are for boys and girls competing in educational

athletic

s Michigan was one of the first state

association

s to adopt a return-to-play protocol that prohibits further competition on the same day as the suspected concussion and that only allows the athlete to return with unconditional approval by medical personnel is modified in seasonal soccer practice. In one study, total contact policies were found to reduce head impacts by more than forty percent.

This is a report from John Johnson in East Lansing.