American football is the most well-known 11-versus-11 warzone, and many have admired it for as long as they can remember.
But the game is changing. LSU football is changing.
The LSU football team partnered with the Marucci BodiTrak Head Health Network to conduct a study on how on-field head collisions affect players. The goal is to figure out ways to limit the internal body demolition that is a part of the game players have grown to love.
The project is a research-based joint study with Penn State University. The two programs are working to collaborate on the data they receive to see how their respective programs compare when focusing on hits to the head.
Each team implemented force-sensors inside the helmets of 24 of its players at the beginning of fall camp. For LSU, 16 are linemen, and the remaining helmets are allocated between safeties, linebackers, wide receivers, fullbacks and running backs.
LSU aims to find and prevent the amount of damage each observed player is receiving through these force-monitoring systems. The sensors will be monitored on the LSU sideline during games by a computer, calculating the impact on subjected players.
If the data collected at LSU and Penn State resemble each other, then the teams can forward their data to the NCAA to make policy changes, if need be, said graduate assistant athletic trainer Lauren Norton, who is leading the Tigers’ head injury assessment research.
“The force monitoring was developed for real time, so we can detect how severe the injury is and get that person out of the game,” said Andrew T. Walker, a Yale School of Medicine alumnus and neuroradiologist. “What we want is something on the field that can tell us if this is going to be too severe of an impact to not have an impact on the brain — to see if we need to get them off the field.”
The Tigers are coming aboard a train of universities that have previously begun football-related traumatic brain injury research. Programs such as Virginia Tech, Dartmouth, Brown, Oklahoma and Stanford started brain injury research with force-calibration sensors dating back to 2003.
The goal of this study is to reduce the intensity of these injuries as they happen. The research will continue through the 2015 regular season and is likely to grow.
“If the players are showing us signs of a concussion, we will look at the data,” Norton said. “We can look at how much force the hit had. We will also go up to video and grab the clip of that hit. So, we can go back, look at the video, look at the force and figure out what is causing the concussions that we do get.”
The problem facing football is much larger than merely LSU and Penn State players.
Former New Orleans Saints safety and eight-year NFL veteran Steve Gleason knows this tale all too well.
Gleason is remembered best for his game-altering blocked punt against the Atlanta Falcons in 2006 — the first home game for the Saints inside the Superdome after Hurricane Katrina.
Gleason was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, more commonly known as ALS or Lou Gehrig’s disease, in 2011. The disease stems from minor brain damage, which happens frequently to players in football. Gleason previously said how he would not want his son, Rivers, to play football because he fears how the game can damage one’s body.
Walker, who specializes in sports concussion and sports traumatic brain injuries, conducts studies for one of only four groups in collaboration with the National Football League to dissect the complexity of brain injuries in football.
Walker focuses mainly on retired NFL players, reviewing and examining the damage done to athletes’ brains throughout their playing careers.
“About 30 percent of the guys we have studied are showing structural brain injury, and that’s a big problem for these guys,” Walker said. “Now, they are at higher risk as they get older for dementia, and at higher risk for other diseases such as ALS. Just the fact that an individual plays in the NFL — they are at a four-times-greater risk than the normal population to get Alzheimer’s, Lou Gehrig’s disease and so on.”
Walker receives patients from the NFL Player’s Association. His expertise in an MRI technique called diffusion tensor imaging helps him evaluate the functionality inside the minds of these ex-players to a precise degree of abnormality.
But Walker gets the finished, destroyed product.
The retired players Walker examines through DTI-MRI must go through a labyrinth of help to find the damage’s gravity — all the while knowing the damage is permanent.
“So, it’s a combined evaluation when these retired NFL players come to us,” Walker said. “They see neurologist for a neurologic evaluation. They see a neuropsychologist for complex neuropsychological testing, and then we perform a brain MRI with DTI as well. So they get a full-brain MRI evaluation to look for structural damage to the brain.”
The DTI-MRI stage of the evaluation looks specifically at the brain’s performance when compared to other healthy, unharmed brain illustrations.
“The DTI portion of the exam is a specialized sequence,” Walker said. “It is part of a unique brain MRI sequence that looks at water movement within the white matter tracts.”
These tests evaluate how efficiently water is diffused along the white matter tracts — the main informational highways of the brain.
If the brain is fully functional, healthy water will flow normally as a car would on the interstate — anywhere between 60 and 70 mph. If the brain experiences traumatic damage of any sort, the water would grind through a traffic jam at less than 50 mph.
It’s a traffic jam no one wants to experience but a reality many footballers are stuck in for a lifetime.
Football researchers are using DTI testing for brain-injury studies. In 2014, Dr. Christopher Whitlow, a Wake Forest School of Medicine radiology professor, conducted a study on 24 players from a Chicago high school football team. The initial DTI-MRI exam was conducted prior to a season full of games and practices, and a conclusion test was administered at the end of the season.
The study found the players, all between the ages of 16 and 18, experienced significant decrease in the fluidity of water transport inside the white matter tracts in the brain. All the high school players experienced some, if not significant, traumatic brain damage.
Walker’s research cannot point to where brain damage begins in the timeline of a football career. Football play resulting in brain injury is studied mainly at the more-physically athletic collegiate and professional levels, but 70 percent of football careers begin in youth and high school development settings.
The NFL, filled with extremely athletic and strong men of all shapes and sizes, has the most life-threatening hits in the sport.
LSU, though, continues to progress and develop ways to create a safer environment for the future of its football program.
“I could play you 100 different NFL collisions,” Walker said. “What is amazing to me is that 80 percent of the time the players get up and walk away. But the other 20 percent result in a devastating head injury that may result in unconsciousness. There is no way looking at the impact that you can tell [the damages]. There is such a complex combination of forces that you just cannot tell.”