This week's best links from MomsTeam.com, a website devoted to health and safety in youth sports:
- While the National Football League and the governing bodies of football at the youth and high school level have done a lot in recent years to make the sport safer, MomsTeam's founder and publisher Brooke de Lench believes improving football safety is largely up to parents. That means working in local communities with all those with a stake in making football safer, including independent football organizations, school boards, school superintendents, athletic directors, coaches, school nurses and psychologists, and other health care providers, and networking with other parents, coaches, administrators and medical professionals at the local, state, regional and national levels to share ideas on what works and what doesn't.
- Limiting or eliminating contact practices in football would result in an 18 to 40 percent reduction in head impacts respectively over the course of a high school football season, reported a new study by researchers at the University of Michigan. The study concludes that, until the risk factors for chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) are better defined, and research shows that reducing the time spent learning to tackle in practice will not lead to increased risk of concussions in games, policymakers should proceed with caution in imposing such limits.
- New research suggests that the best way to combat the chronic underreporting of concussion by athletes may be to target the prevailing negative attitude of coaches towards reporting. As MomsTeam's senior editor Lindsay Barton reported, the study by researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health and Boston University's Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy adds to a growing body of evidence challenging the conventional wisdom that inadequate athlete concussion knowledge is the principal barrier to increased reporting.
- Whether an ankle sprain, ACL rehabilitation, or perhaps rotator cuff tendonitis, it is commonly known that injured athletes can benefit from physical therapy. But what about concussions? Can physical therapy help? MomsTeam's expert physical therapist Dr. Keith Cronin explained what parents, coaches and athletes should know about how physical therapy can be beneficial following a concussive event.
-- MomsTeam.com and NFL Evolution
