‘An invisible injury’: How concussions impact student athletes

One of the biggest challenges about treating a concussion is that they can’t be seen — even on MRI and CAT scans.

“A concussion is an invisible injury,” said Dr. John Leddy, a concussions expert who runs the Concussion Management Clinic at UB.

Symptoms such as headaches, dizziness, trouble thinking and concentrating often go unreported to trainers and coaches.

This is where UB’s Sports Medicine Department comes in. Their job is to educate athletes on the signs of concussions.

At the beginning of every fall semester, the Sports Medicine Department discusses injuries and concussions with each UB Athletics team, according to Dr. Brian Bratta, UB’s athletic director of sports medicine and wellness services. They review symptoms, report procedures, return-to-play protocol and the concussion diagnosis process.

“If we can educate them and show them that we’re here to help them and do those things, that makes them a little more trusting and a little more honest with us about signs and symptoms,” Bratta said. “I think that’s made a difference. I think a lot of it is just education.”

UB’s concussion experts hope that their efforts will help mitigate the worst effects of concussions on student athletes.

Continuing to play while concussed doubles one’s recovery time, according to

Leddy. If a person hits their head again while concussed, it “more than quadruples recovery time.”

“Imagine if you had the flu for more than a month — that would interfere with your life,” Leddy said.

Along with educating athletes, Leddy also works on enhancing concussion treatment.

He says that 20 years ago, concussions used to be treated as minor injuries. Experts would recommend concussed individuals relax in a dark room. But now, with growing research, that’s no longer the case.

While working as a team physician, Leddy realized that telling athletes to hold off on exercising wasn’t helping. So he and his research partner of 20 years, Dr. Barry Willer, decided to try a new approach: light aerobic exercise.

They started treating concussion patients with a treadmill test adapted from a treatment plan for heart disease. They first started with patients who had symptoms for more than a month. The patients walked at a set speed and incline, while their heart rate was monitored, until their symptoms flared up. Eventually, they tested patients closer to when the concussion occurred. Patients recovered faster when they started doing light aerobic exercise — such as walking — within the first few days after a concussion.

“What was nice in this study is we showed that if you did it early in that first week you prevented half of those students from going out to this delayed recovery

Living begins requiring Narcan training for residential life staff, prompting policy changes Gov. Kathy Hochul mandates overdose prevention medication in SUNY and CUNY residential living areas

Campus

Campus Living partnered with the Erie County Department of Health (ECDOH) to provide residential life staff the training to administer Naloxone in the event of an opioid overdose.

According to the ECDOH, Naloxone, widely known as Narcan, temporarily blocks the effects of opioids and can reverse overdoses. The effects of Naloxone can last anywhere between 30 to 90 minutes.

The Naloxone training was held during the spring paraprofessional staff training at the start of the semester, according to Erin Dengler, senior assistant director of marketing and communications for Student Life.

A shortened version of the training that residential staff received can be found here.

“We are partnering with University Police, who are trained first responders, to finalize the Residential Life policy,” Dengler stated. “Approval of the policy requires alignment with SUNY guidance.”

The policy will include the response steps outlined on the ECDOH’s site, but residential staff are instructed to call UPD rather than 911 in response to any medical-related incidents.

In the event of an emergency, Campus Living staff will administer Narcan if they have access to it on their person or are able to retrieve Narcan before UPD arrives, according to Meegan Hunt, interim director for Residential Life.

Hunt further noted that UPD has “extremely fast response times of two to three minutes.”

Gov. Kathy Hochul signed legislation last fall requiring SUNY and CUNY housing facilities to have a supply of “opioid antagonists” and provide training of resident assistants in the administration with the intention of “leading to faster response times” and “preventing needless tragedies.”

The bill is a response to the opioid epidemic crisis and the increased death rates in NYS, which exceeded national rates in both 2020 and 2021, according to the executive summary of Thomas P. DiNapoli, NYS comptroller.

According to findings in DiNapoli’s summary, in 2021, every 25 out of every 100,000 New Yorkers died from opioid overdoses compared to five per 100,000 in 2010.

“By having on-site opioid antagonists in schools and trained resident assistants capable of administering these antigens, these life saving medications are a common sense solution to preventing more overdose-related fatalities,” the summary says.

Additional information and resources about opioids and other substances in Erie County can be found on ECDOH’s website.