FRIDAY, May 23, 2003 (HealthDayNews) -- Younger athletes take longer to recover from a sports-related concussion, says a University of Pittsburgh study in the May 19 issue of the Journal of Pediatrics.
The study, the first to examine age as a factor in sports concussion recovery, found high school athletes with concussions suffered prolonged memory problems that required longer recovery times compared to college athletes.
The finding supports the idea that high school athletes with concussions need more conservative management and comprehensive assessment. The study may also have important implications for guidelines about when high school athletes who've suffered a concussion can return to play.
The researchers compared post-concussion recovery of high school and college athletes at 24 hours, three days, five days and seven days after the concussion. In tests of self-reported symptoms and neurocognitive function, the high school athletes had much worse memory performance at seven days after concussion than age-matched control subjects.
Despite sustaining more severe injuries, concussed college athletes at three days after injury showed memory performance similar to age-matched control subjects.
"Our finding that high school athletes did not recover from concussion as quickly as college athletes is a cause for concern because the largest majority of at-risk athletes are at the high school level or below," principal investigator Dr. Melvin Field says in a news release.
"Furthermore, existing return-to-play guidelines assume a standard use for all age groups and levels of play, from school-age to professional. Our study is the first to suggest that there may be differing vulnerabilities to concussion at different ages and that current guidelines may not be appropriate for all age groups," Field says.
Recent studies show more than 62,000 concussions occur each year in high school sports in the United States. Football accounts for 63 percent of those concussions.
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