Data from football players help scientists understand concussions better

Better understanding of the nature of injury to the brain can help design better safety gear

It can happen to all of us but if you are a football player the word “concussion” can have a particularly familiar ring.

Taking a hard hit to the head can give you a concussion. But, Stanford researchers report in Physical Review Letters, in most cases, the connection is anything but simple.

Combining data recorded from football players with computer simulations of the brain, a team working with David Camarillo, studied concussions. They found that concussions seem to arise when an area deep inside the brain shakes more rapidly and intensely than surrounding areas.

But, they also found that the mechanical complexity of the brain means there is no straightforward relationship between the hit and the nature of the injury.

“Concussion is a silent epidemic that is affecting millions of people. What we were trying to do is understand the biomechanics of the brain during an impact,” said Mehmet Kurt, a former postdoctoral fellow in Camarillo’s lab. Kurt and Kaveh Laksari, also a former postdoctoral fellow with Camarillo, are co-lead authors on the paper. Yet exactly how concussions come about remains something of a mystery.

Armed with that understanding, Kurt said, engineers could better diagnose, treat and hopefully prevent concussion.

An area deep in the brain called the corpus callosum ­- which connects the left and right halves of the brain – shakes more rapidly than the surrounding areas

The key difference between impacts that led to concussions and those that did not, the researchers discovered, had to do with how – and more importantly where – the brain shakes. After an average hit, the researchers’ computer model suggests the brain shakes back and forth around 30 times a second in a fairly uniform way; that is, most parts of the brain move in unison.

In injury cases, the brain’s motion is more complex. An area deep in the brain called the corpus callosum ­- which connects the left and right halves of the brain – shakes more rapidly than the surrounding areas, placing significant strain on those tissues.

“Observing this in experiments is going to be very challenging, but that would be an important next step,” Laksari said.

If scientists better understand how the brain moves after an impact and what movement causes the most damage, there are promising pay-offs. Kurt said, “We can design better helmets, we can devise technologies that can do onsite diagnostics, for example in football, and potentially make sideline decisions in real time.”