Who doesn’t love watching a good rugby match? The French sure do! On Saturday June 2nd 2018, my Neuroscience class and I attended a rugby match. Apparently it was a pretty important one at that! As we hopped off the RER onto the stop where the Stade de France is located, we were greeted by enthusiastic fans; they were cheering, drinking, socializing, singing and getting hyped up for the game! It was such a great atmosphere being surrounded by a unified group of people. We walked with large crowds towards the 11thsection of the stadium and found our seats. There were flags on our seats that we waved continuously throughout the game since we could not for the life of us figure out which team they were for (I still don’t know which team the flags represented, but hey, I always love a free souvenir ¯\_(ツ)_/¯)
I picked a player, and throughout the game, I attempted (and failed) to count the number of hits he received that could potentially lead to a concussion. My fellow students and I recently read and wrote a review on how the number of concussions in male rugby players could lead to depression and mild cognitive disorders (Decq, 2016). Many French professional rugby players were identified as well as a large number of French non-contact sport athletes. Telephone interviewers were conducted to both groups to evaluate depression, cognitive disorders, fluency, and headache severity. With statistical analyses, scores for all the questionnaires were compared between the two groups and the researchers were able to find an association between the number of concussions and depression and headache severity.
As I watched the game, I was thinking about how each hit could potentially have severe effects to that athlete’s health. I have always enjoyed watching sport’s games, but as I watched each painful blow, I wondered to myself why anyone would want to put oneself through something like that. I always knew concussions were not good for you, but I never took the time to think about how professional athletes for certain sports had to face the harms of a contact sport basically every day of their lives. It made me think about how much a person’s lifestyle could change their overall brain function and have such high consequences later on in life. As the study showed, some of these athletes may face major issues down the road if not sooner. Despite this fact, the athletes seemed to be passionately throwing their bodies for the game and it was a great experience as I admired the hard work of all of the players and enthusiastically joined the fanfare.
Sources:
Decq P, Gault N, Blandeau M, et al. Long-term consequences of recurrent sports concussion. Acta Neurochir 2016;158:289–300. doi:10.1007/s00701-015-2681-4