Concussion-free head blows may still affect brain

Severe force to the head that does not cause a concussion may still induce changes in the brain's white matter.

John McStravick/Flickr

Blows to head during a sports game may still change the brain, even if athletes don’t suffer a concussion.

College athletes who played contact sports and who performed more poorly than expected on memory and learning tests also had more changes in their brain’s white matter than varsity competitors who didn’t play contact sports, concludes a study published December 11 in Neurology.

The results suggest a link between how hard or often athletes are hit and changes in learning, memory and the brain’s white matter. However, the brain scans did not show large-scale patterns of changes from the beginning to the end of the playing season among the contact-sport athletes.

Ashley Yeager is the associate news editor at Science News. She has worked at The Scientist, the Simons Foundation, Duke University and the W.M. Keck Observatory, and was the web producer for Science News from 2013 to 2015. She has a bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and a master’s degree in science writing from MIT.

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