The NFL You can still do more to prevent concussion without removing what makes sport excitingaccording to its medical director.
League representatives met with their counterparts from the Premier League English football on Wednesday for share ideas about concussion and other areas of player health.
NFL protocols are often considered among the strictest in the world, and since 2002 has carried out more than 50 rule changes designed to eliminate potentially dangerous tactics and reduce the risk of injury.
However, its chief medical officer, Dr. Allen Sills, says more can be done without changing the sport beyond recognition.
“There is always more work to be done,” he told the PA news agency. “One thing that our commissioner (Roger Goodell) he likes to say is that the game can be safer and more exciting. Same, I think it too.”
“I do not think that our work is done on concussions or any of these health and safety areas. We can continue to improve security while preserving the exciting elements of the game. ”
“This will imply continuous changes in the equipment, on the surface, in the way we teach, train and referee the game and I think that’s what makes this an exciting era in sports medicineSee how we’re using all of that data and driving medical-driven decisions about how the game is played and taught. “
Dr. Sills highlighted the 2018 change to penalize teams if a player lowers his head to initiate and make contact with his helmet against an opponent.
“That change in the rules came directly from a lot of the work we’ve done in preventing concussions and in the analysis of how concussions occurred, “he explained.
“When we did that work, we did not do it only as medical personnel, we also did it in conjunction with various representatives of our coaches and our players associationso I think it’s a collaborative effort. “
Dr. Sills is in London right now, and the NFL makes its regular visit to London in October. On Sunday, the Jacksonville Jaguars they face the Miami Dolphins at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, following last weekend’s game between the Atlanta Falcons and the New York Jets.
The link between sports head trauma and long-term brain injury has been the focus of attention in the United Kingdom in recent years, with Rugby World Cup winner Steve Thompson as part of a group that she sued union authorities after her early-onset dementia diagnosis.
The 2019 FIELD study found that professional soccer players were three and a half times more likely to die from a neurodegenerative disease than members of the general population of the same age.
In 2013, the NFL reached an agreement with former players suing her for head injuries they suffered, and more recent studies on the brains of deceased former players have also found evidence of a higher incidence of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a degenerative condition.
Dr. Sills is confident that the changes the NFL has made in recent years, both in terms of prevention and accurate diagnosis, they will create “positive benefits” for current players.
“In the last few decades we have greatly improved our understanding of how (concussion symptoms) and the players have improved a lot in identifying the symptoms they might have ”, ad.
“Both of these things have meant that we are quicker to diagnose and we have all become more sophisticated with the return to the game, and I have to believe that they will produce a very different set of results for future athletes.”
