Do Collegiate Contact Sports Impair Cognition?


This is the Medscape Neurology Minute. I am Dr. Alan Jacobs. Researchers from Dartmouth University have published a study to determine whether exposure to repetitive head impacts over a single season negatively affects cognitive performance in collegiate contact-sport athletes. Participants in this prospective cohort study included 214 NCAA Division I college football and ice hockey players who wore instrumented helmets that recorded the acceleration time history of the head following impact, and 45 non-contact-sport athletes as controls. All athletes were assessed prior to and shortly after the season with a cognitive screening battery (imPACT), and a subgroup of athletes were also assessed with 7 measures from a neuropsychological test battery. Few cognitive differences were found between the athlete groups at the preseason and postseason assessments. However, they found a higher percentage of the contact-sport athletes performing more poorly than predicted during postseason on a measure of new learning (the California Verbal Learning Test) compared with the noncontact athletes. On 2 postseason cognitive measures, imPACT reaction time and Trails 4/B, poorer performance was significantly associated with higher scores on several head impact exposure metrics. The investigators concluded that repetitive head impact over the course of a single season may negatively affect learning in some collegiate athletes and that further work is needed to assess whether such effects are short-term or persistent. This study was selected from Medscape's Practice-Changing Articles in Neurology. I'm Dr. Alan Jacobs.

Abstract