A new measure of the effects of cranial impact in American football players can be used in conjunction with magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and neurological testing to assess the cumulative effect on players before and after the American football season.
Scientists at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center in North Carolina have developed the novel metric, known as Risk Weighted Cumulative Exposure (RWE), to allow them to capture the exposure of players to the risk of concussion over the course of a football season by measuring the frequency and magnitude of all impacts. The metric was developed by biomedical engineers Joel Stitzel, Jillian Urban and colleagues at Wake Forest Baptist and the Virginia Tech – Wake Forest University School of Biomedical Engineering and Sciences. Details have now been published in the online edition of the Annals of Biomedical Engineering.
The team collected data from high school football games and practices during the sport’s season and looked at the effects in terms of linear and rotational acceleration separately on the overall risk of injury to layers. They also recorded the combined probability of injury associated with both types of movement and then developed the RWE to give them cumulative risk of injury.