Susceptibility versus Resiliency to Concussive Injury and Head Acceleration Events in Athletics
Open Access
- Author:
- Walter, Alexa Elizabeth
- Graduate Program:
- Kinesiology
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- February 06, 2020
- Committee Members:
- Semyon Slobounov, Dissertation Advisor/Co-Advisor
Semyon Slobounov, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
Sayers John Miller, III, Committee Member
Wayne Joseph Sebastianelli, Committee Member
Peter Andrew Arnett, Outside Member
Peter H. Seidenberg, Special Member
Jonathan Bates Dingwell, Program Head/Chair - Keywords:
- concussion
subconcussion
head acceleration events
athlete
college-aged
football
imaging
biomarker
cognitive - Abstract:
- Involvement in sport has been an integral part of American culture, both as a social entity as well as a developmental one. However, despite the ever-growing popularity of sport, major concern has been raised recently regarding the safety of contact sports. By nature, contact sports often involve exposure of the head to potentially damaging forces. Sports-related concussion and repetitive exposure to impacts have become areas of growing public concern, especially given their potential link to long-term neurodegenerative damage. While this area of study has been burgeoning more recently, much is still unknown about these injuries and their long-term effects. More specifically, there have been questions raised regarding why, in individuals exposed to the same sport over the same periods of time, some individuals are functionally and clinically resilient to deficits while other individuals are susceptible to functional and structural damage from head injuries. Therefore, the overall goal of this dissertation was to examine, using multiple modalities, why some individuals may be more susceptible and some more resilient to brain changes after sports-related concussion or to repetitive exposure of head acceleration events. Individually, Chapter 2 was a systematic examination of the current literature regarding clinical/cognitive, imaging, and biomarker outcomes over the course of a single season of participation in contact sports focusing on athletes’ college-aged and younger. Chapter 3 examined the influence of an individual athlete’s genetics on past history of sport-related concussion. Chapter 4 examined various clinical and cognitive outcomes over the course of a single season of football participation and, in addition, compared reproducibility between two seasons and how governing body rule changes might indirectly affect outcome. Chapter 5 examined the role of the cervical spinal cord in exposure to repetitive head acceleration events using diffusion tensor imaging. Jointly, these chapters serve to further the understanding of 1) how different modalities can be used to study head injuries in an efficient, yet clinically and functionally relevant way, and 2) how to begin to identify and distinguish factors that may differentiate individuals in regard to their susceptibility or resiliency to injury. The concept of susceptibility versus resiliency requires further study before concrete answers are determined, but this dissertation contributes to the growing body of work on the topic and how individual factors can be examined to best protect athletes and keep sports safe.