concussions Page 14 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights

Chris Pronger Wants To Get Healthy Enough "Just To Live A Normal Life"
Every morning, the fine folks at Sports Radio Interviews sift through the a.m. drive-time chatter to bring you the best interviews with coaches, players, and personalities across the sports landscape. Today: Pronger will almost certainly never play again....

High School AD Accuses Opposing Trainer Of Misdiagnosing Concussion To Remove Star Player From Game
There's major controversy over an incident in a Boston girls' basketball playoff game, in which New Mission High School's star player was injured during the fourth quarter. She was examined by the other team's trainer and diagnosed with a concussion—falsely diagnosed, says New Mission's athletic dir...

Hockey Sure Is Having A Lot Of Concussions Lately
The numbers are kind of insane—there are currently 25 players out with concussions, or "upper body injuries" that include "concussion-like symptoms." (That includes Rene Bourque, whose team has "no idea" when he suffered it.)...

Retired NFL Players Are Depressed And Don't Even Know It: Study
The most striking aspects of the new head-trauma study of former NFL players published in JAMA Neurology are not the formal findings per se. In many ways, those merely quantify and validate suspicions that even casual fans likely hold. The rub is that 40 percent of the retired players that researche...

Deion Sanders, On Players Out With Concussions: "Half These Guys Are Trying To Make Some Money"
Deion Sanders, concussion truther. Though the commissioner of of the NFL went on Face the Nation today to deny that his league ever covered up the dangers of football and its potential to induce brain damage—because at this point, denying the dangers themselves is impossible—Deion Sanders isn't co...

New Study Reveals That CTE May Be Detectable In Living Patients
A new study, published by researchers at UCLA in the American Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry, shows evidence that Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE) can be detected in living patients via positron emission tomography (PET) scans. CTE is a particular type of brain damage that causes depression,...

Willis McGahee Wouldn't Describe The Aftermath Of This Massive Hit That Got Him Carted Off The Field As An "Injury"
Above is the infamous Ryan Clark hit on Willis McGahee, four years ago yesterday, that put McGahee on a stretcher to close out the 2009 AFC Championship game. Though the next day the Associated Press considered it newsworthy that Willis McGahee would, in fact, recover from the collision, McGahee t...

Brian Scalabrine, Of All People, Also Risked His Long-Term Health By Rushing Back From A Concussion
We talk a lot about football players risking their long-term health and well-being by rushing back on to the field after sustaining horrible injuries, and in particular, risking their mental acuity and balance by forgoing concussion recovery procedures. The same holds true for hockey, where Sidney ...

Junior Seau Had Chronic Brain Damage
According to ESPN, former NFL linebacker Junior Seau had Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE) at the time of his suicide last May. In an interview with ESPN, Seau's widow and son claim that researchers at the National Institutes of Health informed them of the diagnosis after completing a thorough...

Report: Former Pro Bowl Defensive Lineman Neil Smith, 46, Suing The NFL For Concussion-Related Fraud, Misrepresentation And Negligence
Neil Smith, a six-time Pro Bowl selection at defensive end who played eight years for the Chiefs, three for the Broncos and one for the Chargers, is suing the NFL in federal court for misrepresentation and negligence. Smith seeks sanctions against the NFL and damages for memory-loss, cognitive impai...

The Meaning Of Ryan Freel's "9 Or 10" Concussions
Ryan Freel was "tough." In baseball parlance, that means hustling on every pitch, giving up your body to make the play. These types of players are celebrated, of course. In August 2006, the Cincinnati Enquirer paid tribute to just the latest example of Freel's toughness, a diving catch on the warnin...

Alex Smith Has A Good Shot At Setting An NFL Passing Record This Season
It's been more than a month since Colin Kaepernick became the man in San Francisco. The Niners were 6-2, and Alex Smith's numbers were sparkling—not just for his supposed game-manager image, but up there with anyone in the league. And then Smith took a couple of hard hits in the first half of a game...

My 100 Concussions: Notes From A Terrified CTE Study Participant
Former football player and pro wrestler Chris Nowinski recently set up a massive research project with Boston University to examine the long-term effects of concussion damage on the human brain. Anyone can volunteer to have his or her brain posthumously donated to the study, and one anonymous Deadsp...

The Last Tackle Of Jovan Belcher's Life Left Him Shaken Up
Last week, a friend of Jovan Belcher's told us that "if you review the footage of the Cincinnati game [Belcher] took a few hits to the head directly" and described how, after that game, Belcher "was dazed and was suffering from short term memory loss."...

Why The NCAA Doesn't Care About Concussions
In the third quarter of a 34-17 loss to Cincinnati this past Saturday, UConn quarterback Chandler Whitmer took what he would later describe as a "bullet to the head." Chandler had suffered a head injury the previous week against Louisville. "We're just trying to be as careful as we can," Huskies coa...

Why The NFL's "Concussion Crisis" Isn't Really A Concussion Crisis
Originally published in Bloomberg View....

Friend: Belcher "Was Dazed, Suffering From Short-Term Memory Loss" After Last Start; Alcohol, Painkillers, Domestic Tensions Played Role In Murder-Suicide
Jovan Belcher and his girlfriend, Kasandra Perkins, had separated two weeks ago in the midst of a dispute over the care of their three-month-old daughter, Zoey, a friend of Belcher's has told Deadspin. They'd only very recently reconciled. In email messages sent to us, the friend described Belcher a...

Australia's Rugby League Cracks Down On Big Hits, And Fans Aren't Happy
In any discussion of player safety in American football, rugby inevitably gets invoked in two ways: NFL players are called pussies for wearing body armor, and rugby is pointed to as an example of how players will self-police and self-preserve on tackles when they're not overly protected. Neither of...

LeSean McCoy Gets Concussed, And It's All Andy Reid's Fault
If Andy Reid's out, he's taking as many players as he can with him. That's the only possible explanation for leaving his starters in until the very end of a blowout loss at Washington, a strategy that paid off with LeSean McCoy receiving a concussion at a time when he should have been on the bench, ...

Arizona Quarterback Returns From Concussion, Promptly Pukes Again
Remember Matt Scott? He's the Arizona quarterback who unleashed a flood of vomit after a helmet-to-helmet collision against USC a few weeks ago. Wildcats coaches asserted Scott was fine and did not, in fact, suffer a concussion during that game—but he did suffer one the next week against UCLA. Tha...