April 29, 2024, TORONTO – A new study from York University's Faculty of Health may offer reassuring news for parents whose children have a history of concussion, but want to get back to playing sports. Researchers from York University's Faculty of Health spent more than a decade scouting fields, rinks and courts across the Greater Toronto Area for participants with a history of concussion and tested their performance on complex eye-hand coordination tasks, finding that age and previous sports experience were larger factors in cognitive-motor integration than a history of multiple concussions.
"In previous work, we've already shown that kids who have any number of concussions perform worse than children who've never had a concussion, but we did notice there was this subgroup of kids who seemed to perform motor skills just fine within weeks of getting a concussion," says School of Kinesiology and Health Science Prof. Lauren Sergio . "What we found here suggests that previous sports experience may offer some neuroprotective benefits against the effects of concussion."
The York researchers, including Sergio and first author York PhD candidate Nicole Smeha, recruited 223 individuals for the study who have a previous history of concussion and gave them a standard task to perform and a more complex one. While the study mostly looked at children and youth playing hockey, soccer, football and basketball, there were a smaller number of "beer league" adult participants included in the research, with the youngest participant being nine and the oldest 53, with experience also being the more important factor with older players. They also looked at sex, but did not find it to be a significant factor, says Sergio, also the York Research Chair in Brain Health and Gender in Action.
"Our hypothesis was that a higher number of concussions would be the largest factor for cognitive-motor integration, but after analyzing the results we realized there were likely stronger factors at play," says Smeha.
Concussions, a form of brain injury, are a complex health issue with most concussions sustained in youth and adolescents under the age of 18. Research shows concussion can lead to deficits in cognitive and motor function, including slower processing speed, increased reaction time, slower upper limb velocity and poorer accuracy. While further injury is a risk, Sergio says that the takeaway message is that multiple factors need to be considered when deciding whether and when to put a kid back into sports after a concussion.
"If your child has had a second concussion, and they're new to sports, they might be more vulnerable to getting hurt again, because they're not going to be able to perform at the same level, whereas if your kid is playing at a higher level, yes, they've still suffered a brain injury, but the neural network controlling movement may be more resilient."
