UBC concussion study recommends longer post-injury rest period

Just about any sport contains instances where athletes seem to be able to return to games after being on the receiving end of a hit to the head, or return to the field of play weeks earlier than perhaps they should have.

A couple of weeks ago at the Malaysian Open, for example, Eugenie Bouchard suffered what she called “concussion-like symptoms” similar to the ones she had last fall in Beijing. Instead of ending the game against Elina Svitolina when she felt dizzy and not all there, Bouchard played on and lost the match. Late in January, Calgary Flames defenceman Dennis WIdeman displayed "concussion symptoms" after taking a heavy hit to the head, but didn't miss a shift - and received a 20-game suspension for cross-checking a linesman during the same game, a suspension that was halved last week by an arbitrator who noted Wideman's "concussed state" as a mitigating factor.

Now a University of British Columbia study indicates that anything less than the two weeks’ rest some studies have recommended is not enough to fully recover from a concussion.

“Our results indicate that it takes two weeks or longer for the myelin sheath to recover,” said Alex Rauscher, an MRI scientist and Canada research chair in the department of pediatrics at the University of British Columbia. “The good news is people generally recover from a concussion and go back to normal after two months. We don’t know whether it’s two months or one month but it’s certainly longer than two weeks.”

Rauscher said the study focused on 11 university hockey players who had suffered a concussion, doing a range of follow-up magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) at three days, two weeks and two months after the injury occurred. The scans were used to locate damage to the myelin sheath, an insulation wire that protects the nerves in the brain.

“This paper by itself is not going to change the practice how recovery times are dealt with, but it’s another piece. We do not have a scan yet that tells us that a person can go back to playing hockey safely,” he said. “It’s still clinically assessed by a doctor which is the main rationale for letting a person play hockey again or football again after they have a concussion.”

A 2011 study in the Canadian Medical Association Journal showed only 31 per cent of NHL players took more than 10 days off after suffering a concussion, and recovery time more than doubled with each successive concussion. This seems to be the norm when it comes to concussion recovery: if it’s a mild knock there’s a limited rest period, but heavier knocks are treated more seriously.

Mild or heavy, it’s proven that any knock to the head needs sufficient time away from sport to repair damage. Until we find an MRI scan that produces immediate concussion results, we’ll continue to have cases like Genie Bouchard and Dennis Wideman.