This past weekend, we traveled to Stade de France to watch the Top 14 final game in France, featuring Montpellier and the Castres. After being handed a Montpellier flag for free, we became avid fans (Fig. 1). Unfortunately, the Castres came out on top and won the coveted Brennus Shield. During our time at the game, we saw medics come out to the field four times, 3 fights, hundreds of tackles, and I believe a couple lost teeth. Needless to say, rugby is an unforgiving sport and results in copious amounts of player to player collisions (Fig. 2).
This high impact nature of the sport was the motivation behind a recent study that examined the effects of recurrent concussions in retired professional rugby players long-term (Decq et al., 2016). There has been a rise in concussion research within the past couple decades, stemming from findings of brain injury and abnormalities in boxers and more recently American football players that had suffered repeated blows to the head. However, much of the foundation of this work has been in post-mortem examinations of athletes who suffered severe neurological symptoms during their lifetime, or case studies that detail the decline in brain and cognitive functions of former contact sport athletes (Perrine, Helcer, Tsiouris, Pisapia, & Stieg, 2017). For us to establish a potentially causal link between these sports and these neurological effects, which are also prevalent to an extent in the general population, we need to perform larger scale, comparative studies, like the Decq et al. (2016) study.
A particularly important area, however, is not just effects at the professional level, but the risks posed to younger players and children involved in contact sports. Do we need a complete re-evaluation of how sports are played? Does the age when children start have an effect? Would you allow your child to pursue boxing football, or rugby? These are the questions that people want immediate answers to and recent neuroimaging studies having begun painting a clearer picture of the damage sustained to connectivity in the brain, with and without symptomatic blows to the head or diagnosable concussions (Abbas et al., 2015).
Overall, this is a critical issue in contact sports at large. Recurrent concussions and perhaps subconcussive events may be implicated in a host of disorders and diseases, including depression, neurodegeneration, cognitive disorders, and more. This has potential effects for rugby, football, soccer, basketball, and a variety of other contact sports that pose a risk of repeat head impacts.
Abbas K., Shenk T.E., Poole V.N., Breedlove E.L., Leverenz L.J., Nauman E.A., Talavage T.M., Robinson M.E., (2015) Alteration of default mode network in high school football athletes due to repetitive subconcussive mild traumatic brain injury: a resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging study. Brain Connect, 5(2): 91-101.
Decq, P., Gault, N., Blandeau, M., Kerdraon, T., Berkal, M., ElHelou, A., Dusfour, B., & Peyrin, J. (2016). Long-term consequences of recurrent sports concussion. Acta Neurochirurgica, 158(2),289-300. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00701-015-2681-4.
Perrine, K., Helcer, J., Tsiouris, A., Pisapia, D., & Stieg, P. (2017). The current status of research on chronic traumatic encephalopathy. World neurosurgery, 102, 533-544. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wneu.2017.02.084.