Tua Tagovailoa Concussion explained by a Concussion Doctor

Oh, it's extremely frustrating to see a situation like this play out in this video. I'm going to break down what happened at tuate tegavailoa. It's a difficult name to pronounce. I'm going to break down what happened last night at the Dolphins Bengals game. but I'm going to pass it on to the science on

concussion

and also second impact syndrome, that if this is the case and I'm not necessarily saying it's because I wasn't there, but I think the evidence clearly points to this being a possible second impact scenario which could mean a very very long and hard recovery for Tua and I really hope this is not the case but let's look at what happened but first I want to take it from a perspective of what happened on Sunday first and then we'll talk about what happened last night and I'll lay out the signs of why this is so important and why the NFL doesn't necessarily have a

concussion

problem, but why they have a concussion management problem, the problem here. and what you'll see when I get into the science on concussions, the concussions themselves aren't really the problem, but having multiple concussions in a short period of time, meaning Sunday and then again on Thursday night night, can be extremely devastating and, in some cases, even fatal. and from what I've heard, I'm conscious and I've been released from the hospital and that's a good sign, but this could have been a lot worse and I still think the road to recovery will be long and let's hope you don't ruin the rest of this process as they have already done with this player, so let's look at the first injury that occurred on Sunday night.

Now you can see or sorry on Sunday afternoon so you can see here. He comes back, takes a shot and leaves. balance they push him down he has a whiplash type mechanism and his head hits the ground now look at this out of balance so concussion has signs and symptoms there you have a sign it's something you can visibly see there are very few of these, but in the NFL now have concussion detectors, so the concussion detectors caught this correctly and went and did further evaluation, let's take another look at this, so he gets hit, he lands on his head, he gets knocked back, he gets hit. the grass and then when he gets up, you can immediately see that he's shaking. balance and then when you fall your knees wobble and you fall, there's enough right there to take someone out because those are obvious signs of neurological impact, you don't fall to the ground like that and when you hold your head and shake your head in pain and you are unbalanced and unstable, this is because what is happening inside your brain is a thunderstorm and you really do not have full control over your nervous system, so I am going to explain why.

This happens and we understand what a concussion is, a concussion is an acceleration of the brain, so when your head hits like this, the brain will speed up and slow down and the brain is actually two different layers of tissue, so you have white matter that is deeper and you have gray matter on the outside, as the brain speeds up, you get this fluid wave that happens in the brain, so imagine the head hitting the grass and the brain moving and those two layers of tissue, white and gray matter, which they accelerate and decelerate. different rhythms, so what you get is this cross cut that occurs and you get a stretch of the brain tissue and when that brain tissue stretches it goes into this excitatory phase, we have this electrical storm and that's when you lose control of your nervous system so he is trying to get off the field and his legs are not working properly he is unbalanced he does not know which way he is up because there is so much activity in his brain that he is not able to understand the world around him that is why this is an obvious sign and that player needs to be taken off the field immediately because he surely has had a concussion injury, now they tried to interpret this as a back injury and actually let him return to the game now.

There is none, unless there is some type of spinal cord involvement. I don't see any reason why he would be unbalanced and you can get spinal cord related concussions either way, so either way there is a neurological injury that needs to be sustained. off the field for that, at least that game, if not more now, if you look at what happens after, this thunderstorm happens, but then over the next few hours or days, you get this drop in energy, if you could imagine it all. That electrical activity that happens inside the brain actually starts to burn a lot more energy than we can produce, so over the next few days this drop in energy occurs and what we've seen in animal studies is that when your energy loses levels are low, you can suffer a concussion more easily and not only if you suffer a second concussion can they become additive and cumulative to the point where you can suffer a fatal injury, but if you suffer a concussion and allow it to recover for complete. you actually end up getting back to a healthy state where you were before, so it's not necessarily the number of concussions you get that's the problem, so it's not necessarily a concussion problem, it's a concussion recovery problem. and what's happening now in professional sports. and why are they so low, there are so many issues around this and there is speculation that why we are starting to see a lot of these cases of CTE is due to the fact that we don't let athletes recover properly.

Here is a study that was done on animals and what we see here is that we have a control group on the far left and then we have a group that suffered a concussion which is a mild traumatic brain injury there in the middle here you can see which is about a 20 reduction and these are your energy levels there's about a 20 reduction in your brain energy levels if you go here you have a severe traumatic brain injury now a severe traumatic brain injury you can see is a 50 reduction these they have permanent brain damage this is when people actually suffer permanent total brain damage, concussion is a temporary injury and you have about a 20 reduction in energy which restores the backup to normal if you give it enough time .

What they did in this particular study is they are animals like rats that they left behind. they waited them until they were fully recovered and then they gave them a second concussion or they gave them a concussion during the middle of their recovery and you can see if they let them wait until their full recovery, which in an animal is five days, a little bit different in In a human, there was no significant difference from having a concussion, meaning if you get a concussion you make a full recovery, it's just another concussion, but if you get a concussion while you're still recovering, is the same as a serious brain injury and, in fact, 10 percent. of the animals in each of these two groups died as a result of their injury, so you can die from a severe traumatic brain injury, but you can also die from having two minor injuries in close temporal proximity and this is the big concern that We're letting athletes back on the field too soon and everyone was calling this, people were already mentioning this and I have a tweet that I'll show you in a second from Chris Nowinski that basically said if this happens, this is going to happen. it's going to be devastating and then lo and behold it happened so let's look at this in humans so the animal model takes about five days to reach that full human recovery.

Studies have found that it happened somewhere between 22 and 30 days, so you can see here. this drop down three 15 days were still significantly different 22 days were still significantly different and finally on day 30 that single star disappeared which means we are no longer significantly different from a control injury which means human recovery does not It's five days, but it's somewhere. about three to four weeks, and this fits with a lot of the research that's been done now, a study that was done on humans looking at second impacts finds that if you suffer a concussion within the first 10 days, your recovery time is now in terms The number of symptoms can be 60 to 90 days later, which means you go from a typical symptomatic recovery of seven to ten days to months and months of potential symptoms, but not only that, instead of taking three to four weeks for your energy levels to improve. getting back to normal so your brain has recovered now can take 90 to 120 days, so three to four months now goes to three to four weeks if you have a concussion now, if you have back-to-back concussions, your time Recovery is Getting your brain back to normal can take three to four months and if you don't take the right time now you will start to get concussed more and more easily and this is the big concern so again I'm going to reiterate that don't. is necessarily a The problem with concussions is improper management of concussions and here's a way we can think about it, so if we think about it this way, we have one hundred percent energy levels, a Once we get down to about 60 percent, we are actually suffering permanent damage. to our brain, so you're walking around here with 100 percent energy, you get a concussion, you drop about 20 to 80, it takes you two to four weeks to get back to that normal brain energy, now the symptoms of a concussion It usually goes away in the first week or so, two of them might have felt fine, but the

doctor

s should have known that their brain hasn't recovered yet because if you get a concussion now, after your symptoms have gone but before Before your brain fully recovers, you will now have a concussion. a cumulative effect where you are now falling into potentially permanent damage to your brain, something that is not recoverable and now the recovery time increases to three or four months, compared to the three or four weeks it now takes you one to two months for your symptoms to disappear. it will actually go away and now if we just rely on the symptoms again, maybe it will feel better in a couple of months and it will be fine.

I'm ready to play again, what if he gets a concussion again? and now it's taking him longer and longer to recover, he's potentially getting himself into career-ending trouble, permanent damage and lifelong impairment because we didn't wait for the right time, so again, it's not a concussion issue, it's a concussion management problem if we had one. If we take a better approach to this and rely less on symptoms and more on actual brain recovery, we would end up with a concussion and then have a good gap between and another concussion, recovery is the same as cumulative concussions tend . occur when they happen very close together within that kind of 10 day to 14 day window, this is on day five, which is actually very bad and potentially could have been fatal and thank God it wasn't, but let's end it with a long term situation here, if it starts back in a couple of weeks we have a big problem and things can get much, much, much worse if they need to take their proper time with this.

In my opinion, again, I wasn't there. I don't know the whole story, but you can objectively see what happened after the first concussion and I'll show it to you after the second concussion, but like I said, everyone was already asking for this. Here's a tweet from Chris Nowinski that said if it takes two to feel tonight, it's a big step back for concussion care in the NFL. Totally agree, if he has a second concussion that destroys his season or career, everyone involved will be sued and should lose their jobs, coaches included, we all saw this even.

You guys gotta know this isn't right, he said that before the game, this is what happened in the game, I'm sure you've all seen this, now here it is, Boom is tackled, knocked to the ground, head hits the ground with enough force and goes to the right. in this bending posture that shows that that is neurological energy, look how his fingers are intertwined like this, that he is unconscious, that also indicates that there is brainstem involvement to some extent and that is an immediate sign of loss of consciousness because Think about the thunderstorm, that thunderstorm is going crazy in his brain right now and it's locking everything in place like that and that's called fencing response and he just goes into that like that clear sign of unconsciousness, um , is still unconscious.

Right now, generally, that's usually a sign of that and then they had to carry him off the field on a stretcher. ThisIt is a possible second impact scenario where massive amounts of brain inflammation occur and you get a massive decrease in your energy levels. The point where permanent damage occurs to the brain or the brain or the person themselves can die from this, so it was a big mistake and I'm very upset that this happened. I can't believe this is happening at the top level after there's so much scrutiny on the NFL, the NFL wants to show that they're doing something about concussions and they get these, you know, these stupid helmets and they think that's doing something. that does nothing of what it is.

It's not a problem with concussions, you can try putting whatever you want on your head. Concussions will still happen, but how are you going to deal with them when they happen? How are we going to take appropriate steps to make sure that when the athletes leave? come back to the sport that their brain has recovered, we're not going to bring people back, you know, four days after they just suffered an obvious concussion that most people in the world suffered and now you're suffering a second concussion , if you had allowed it. person recovers properly this should have never happened um and I hope to God Tua is okay uh thanks for watching put your comments below I really want to hear from you make sure to subscribe to our channel we make all kinds of concussion related content so If you are interested in concussion, be sure to subscribe.

I wish him the best and hope to not see him on the field again for some time just from a brain recovery standpoint, thanks for watching.