Article Text
Abstract
Objective The objective is to determine if suspected concussions in elite football are medically assessed according to the International Conferences on Concussion in Sport consensus statement recommendations.
Setting Men’s Union of European Football Association (UEFA) Football Championship.
Participants All professional football players in the UEFA 2016 Championship Tournament.
Design Observational study.
Outcome measures Potential concussive events (PCEs) were defined as direct head collision incidents resulting in the athlete being unable to immediately resume play following impact. PCEs identified and description of PCE assessment and outcome were accomplished through direct standardised observation of video footage by trained observers in 51 games played in the Men’s UEFA European Championship (10 June–10 July 2016).
Results Sixty-nine total PCEs (1.35 per match) were identified in 51 games played during the 2016 Men’s UEFA European Championship. Forty-eight PCEs (69.6%) resulted in two observable signs of concussion, 13 (18.8%) resulted in three signs and 1 (1.4%) resulted in four signs in the injured athletes. Nineteen (27.5%) PCEs were medically assessed by sideline healthcare personnel while 50 (72.5%) were not. Of the 50 PCEs that were not medically assessed, 44 (88%) PCEs resulted in two or more signs of concussion among injured athletes. Of the 19 medically assessed PCEs, 8 resulted in 3 signs of concussion, and 1 resulted in 4 signs; all assessments concluded in the same-game return for the injured athletes.
Conclusions PCEs were frequent events in the 2016 UEFA Euro championship, but were rarely assessed concordant with the International Conferences on Concussion in Sport consensus statement recommendations. There is an imperative need to improve the assessment and management of players suspected of concussion in elite football.
- concussion
- head injury
- traumatic brain injury
- football
- sport
- injury prevention
This is an open access article distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited, appropriate credit is given, any changes made indicated, and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/.
Statistics from Altmetric.com
Footnotes
Contributors Research concept and design by MDC; data collection and analysis by KJA, JC, AS, CT and AZ; manuscript writing by KJA, JC and MDC. Guarantor: KJA. MDC is a non-paid volunteer on the expert advisory committee of Parachute Canada a not-for-profit injury prevention organization. He is a neurosurgeon at St. Michael’s hospital who wishes he would never see one more brain injured person and that we can prevent every brain injury in the future.
Funding This work is supported by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research Strategic Team Grant in Applied Injury Research #TIR-103946 and the Ontario Neurotrauma Foundation.
Competing interests None declared.
Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.
Data sharing statement The authors are happy to share data published in this study but most if not all data are already included in the manuscript and/or in the public domain.
Patient consent for publication Not required.