Concussion a significant problem that goes under-reported in women’s sport – The Irish Times

On the Super Bowl pre-game show 10 years ago, CBS announcer Jim Nantz accidentally misrepresented a statistic about concussions in women’s sports.

He said that “female soccer players are 2½ times more likely to suffer a concussion than college [American] soccer player”.

The statistic that had slipped through his fingers was a direct comparison between women’s football and men’s football, which only made him alarming in another way.

The Super Bowl pre-game show has a huge audience, and Nantz’s slip-up prompted a brief surge of curiosity. Why should the numbers for women and men be different? Was it only in football? Where was the evidence, the research?

One of the viewers of the show was Katherine Snedaker. As a medical social worker, Snedaker was familiar with concussions and their complex consequences. In her life, she had suffered multiple concussions in different settings, but five years earlier, in 2008, one of her sons had suffered a series of concussions that had caused him to miss school for almost a year.

While caring for him, she sought answers to questions that, to her surprise, were not readily available.

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[ Concussion protocols: What if the opposition say it’s not safe for your school’s best player to play? ]

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“I consulted concussion experts, emailed researchers, and attended dozens of medical conferences to find an alternative to the isolating ‘rest until symptoms resolved’ prescription,” Snedaker wrote years later.

Her quest for knowledge brought her into contact with everyday ignorance: local GPs, teachers, sports trainers didn’t know nearly as much as they needed to.

Unwilling to shut down her desperation and walk away, Snedaker started support groups for other parents, and “my quest to help my own child had now extended to ever wider circles of need,” she wrote.

Snedaker soon became known as the “concussion mother”. What began to emerge over time was a pattern she hadn’t anticipated.

“Working in the clinics and talking to families, I noticed that young girls were not healing as quickly as their families, friends and teachers thought was right. I started a unique group for teenagers with PCS [Post-Concussion Syndrome] which in the end were all women.”

Snedaker delved into the issue and the information gaps and lives of girls and women affected by concussion. Ten years ago, inspired by Nantz’s misstep – and while she was embroiled in a battle with breast cancer – Snedaker set up a website where people could access the research she had collected over the years.

From that seed, PINK Concussions grew into a nonprofit, volunteer organization founded on a mission to “improve the research, medical care, and community care of women with brain injuries.”

Over the past decade, Snedaker’s campaigning zeal has convinced more than 80 professionals to join their professional advisory board and expand on the issues at every opportunity.

On Thursday, she will moderate a 90-minute expert-led debate at the three-day World Brain Injury Conference in Dublin, which will explore issues surrounding concussion in women’s sport that have been perniciously neglected over the years. What exactly does the data say and what do we have to do about it?

“I’ve waited 10 years for this debate,” Snedaker said on a Zoom call last week.

“To try to move the envelope. Do we need a separate concussion protocol for women? For example, we know from research that a woman’s menstrual cycle changes in one way or another after a concussion. But sports medicine doctors aren’t gynecologists, are they?”

Given the greater sensitivity to concussion in sport and the increased awareness of its dangers, it would have been unwise to assume that it was the same for men and women. For many years, medical science would have done very little to challenge this notion.

An article published three years ago in the British Journal of Sports Medicine showed that of 171 studies on concussion conducted since 1967, only 1% of the research focused exclusively on female athletes and 40% of the studies had no female participants. At the heart of this monumental imbalance was the uncertain, unscientific belief that there was no gender difference to consider.

By 2012, enough research had been done for the American Medical Society for Sports Medicine to issue an important statement: “Recent data suggests that female athletes suffer more concussions than their male counterparts in sports with similar rules. Additionally, in several studies, female athletes experience or report a higher number and severity of symptoms and longer recovery times than male athletes.”

If that’s the case, why are concussion protocols the same for women and men?

Improperly treated concussions have mixed results. Occasionally—rarely—the results are tragic.

In a brilliant and harrowing article on CNN.com, Amy Woodyatt shed light on the life and death of two young athletes who committed suicide after suffering concussions that were not properly treated.

Kelly Catlin was an American track cyclist who was a three-time world champion and Olympic silver medalist; Ellie Souter was a British teenage snowboarder who had won a medal at the European Youth Games and set her sights on the 2022 Winter Olympics. Catlin was 23 when she died; Souter had just reached her 18th birthday. In both cases there were catastrophic treatment gaps.

Snedaker will present the PINK Concussion Sports Award to Neil and Morven Cattigan, whose daughter Siobhan suffered brain injuries while playing rugby for Scotland and later died in tragic circumstances, in Dublin on Thursday. The story of the Cattigans has been treated with tenacity and tenderness by David Walsh in The Sunday Times since last summer.

“Siobhan Cattigan’s life ended on November 26, 2021,” Walsh recently wrote. “She passed away at the age of 26 after a relatively sudden and shocking deterioration in her mental health. Her parents, Neil and Morven, believe the crisis that led to her death was caused by a traumatic brain injury sustained while playing rugby for Scotland. They have had no replies and little sympathy from Scottish Rugby Union.”

In the award ceremony on PINK Concussions’ website, Snedaker writes, “Siobhan’s parents fight to develop concussion education programs, research and protocols that target women. They want changes in how women concussions are dealt with to be Siobhan’s legacy so that no one else suffers like she does.”

Snedaker was a tireless, courageous and relentless pioneer on this issue. The conversation she has started is urgent and vital and needs an audience. There must be change.