All Articles by Lindsey Barton Straus, JD

Limiting or eliminating contact practices in football would result in an 18% to 40% reduction in head impacts respectively over the course of a high school football season, reports a new study,  which urges policymakers to proceed with caution in imposing such limits.

Pitching from a mound causes increased stress on the shoulder and elbow of adolescent pitchers as compared with that from flat ground finds a new study, which recommends that pitchers begin their season or return from injury or surgery by starting their pitching progression on flat ground before progressing to the mound.

A growing number of studies challenge the conventional wisdom that inadequate athlete concussion knowledge is the principal barrier to increased concussion symptom reporting.  Because educating youth about the dangers of concussion is unlikely to improve concussion reporting, they say other ways need to be found to increase reporting, among them being to enlist coaches to help create an environment where athletes feel safe in reporting.

The National Operating Committee on Standards for Athletic Equipment (NOCSAE) has clarified its stance regarding voiding of certification for helmets to which third-party after-market products have been affixed.  Instead of automatically voiding the certification, NOCSAE will now leave it up to helmet manufacturers to decide whether a particular third-party add-on affixed to the helmet, such as a impact sensor, voids its certification.

Less contact during practice could mean a lot less exposure to head injuries among young football players and the kind of repetitive subconcussive blows that some researchers suggest can lead to long-term brain injury, and does not result in higher impact exposure during games, according to a new study.

As many as four out of ten of possible concussions sustained by high school athletes are never reported to a coach or medical professional, with less than one in seven  'bell-ringers' being reported, finds an important new study.

The risk of sustaining a concussion in high school football is not effected by the brand, age or recondition status of the helmet, nor by the type of mouth guard worn, says a new study in the American Journal of Sports Medicine finds.

Athletes who didn't get enough sleep the night before undergoing baseline concussion testing didn't perform as well as expected, say researchers presenting their work at the American Orthopaedic Society for Sports Medicine's 2013 Annual Meeting in Chicago, IL.

Concussed high school football players who experience symptoms of post-traumatic migraine (PTM), such as headache, nausea, and sensitivity to light or noise, are more cognitively impaired and take longer to recover than those reporting headache without migraine-based symptoms or no headache at all, says a new study.

Children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) who sustain mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI) such as concussion are more likely to be moderately disabled after injury than those who sustain mTBI without ADHD, finds a new study, which suggests that children with ADHD be encouraged to avoid contact sports that put them at increased risk of TBI.