Schools rugby and concussion. It’s an awful shame that those paths should ever cross.
The cold, hard, dizzying fact is they do. Each year, hundreds of teenage boys and girls across Ireland take concussive blows playing the sport they love. There are no hard numbers on the exact amount of concussions suffered yet but a new study hopes not only to provide an insight but to ensure a safer return to play.
Sports Surgery Clinic has put up €700,000 in funding for a pilot study on concussion in schools rugby that will encompass five Dublin schools and over 200 players.
The study will assess the effects of rehabilitation, post concussion, in adolescent rugby players. It will also develop a Concussion Passport screening service.
In a nutshell, a “battery” of tests [computerised, exercise and physiological] will hopefully give SSC a better idea on how to manage concussion – tailoring it for individual players – an make it safer to return.
The schoolboy players will be monitored of the course of the 2016/17 season [and academic year] with plans afoot to get them involved in building their passports through a website and app. A clear picture on concussion in the schools game will emerge over the course of that season.
Ideally, no player will be concussed but current rugby realities suggest otherwise.
Dr Andy Franklyn Miller, director of rehabilitation and research at SSC, expects 10% of those involved in the study to suffer ‘concussive events’.
Those suspected of being concussed will receive immediate treatment at St Vincent’s Hospital before going through monitoring and rehab under the care of the sports medicine physicians at SSC. Dr Franklyn Miller says:
“Whilst the diagnosis of concussion remains at the forefront of research, we need to remember that children are sustaining concussion in all sorts of sports including GAA, rugby, horse riding, and in the playground, and have been for many years. Improving the care of these athletes after a concussion is our immediate priority.
“We hope to learn which of these screening tests are most sensitive to improve the rehabilitation pathway.
“Memory, recall, thinking and understanding are not only vital to a student’s return to play but also of paramount importance to his or her ‘return to learn’, and this forms a large part of the study.”
No other study, with a focus on schools rugby, has been carried out on such a level anywhere else in the world.
While that is ground-breaking, and welcome, in itself, that is that the extent of the study’s ambition. SSC hope to expand the study to other sports, and include female players, but that is another funding matter for another day.
For now, this is a positive start and one that we will be closely following.
*The five schools involved are Blackrock College, St. Michael’s College, St. Andrew’s College, Gonzaga College and St. Mary’s College.
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