Brett Favre Essay

Ronnie Contrata Period 9 Deep bruises, sprained and broken bones, torn muscles, and strained tendons are some of the injuries that Brett Favre, one of the most famous and successful football quarterbacks of all time, has endured throughout his career. But the most dangerous and life-impacting injuries he has had were concussions. Because of this, Favre is now a leader for safer play and new technology for football and other sports leagues. The NFL and other leagues have made some changes to try to diagnose concussions but not really to prevent them. Professional and college sports leagues must do more to prevent concussions because new research shows there are long-term complications from having multiple concussions, players

In data released by the NFL, players suffered more concussions in 2017 than in the previous 5 years. There were 281 cases including the preseason and practices. It is the highest number in 6 years and an increase of 15.6 percent over the 5-year average. This also doesn’t account for the postseason. There were 190 concussions during the regular season but there was an increase during the preseason to 91 incidents, which was split evenly between preseason games and practices. Only 50 of all of these concussions were self-reported be players (Jones). This emphasizes that there are many concussions in the NFL and it doesn’t seem to be decreasing. Also, it points out that only 50 out of the 281 cases were self-reported and implies that most players would play through the concussion or don’t even know they have one. These concussions can accumulate and cause many neurological diseases to form like Chronic Trauma Encephalopathy, more commonly known as CTE. It is even debatable that even one concussion can give you neurological diseases or disabilities. In a 2017 study from Boston University of deceased NFL players, it found that 110 out of the 111 players’ brains had CTE (Fleming). That is astounding evidence of CTE

This can help prevent or lessen a concussion on the field. One of them is a new type of turf that is more shock absorbent than the turfs used today. Brett Favre supports this pathway as a way to prevent concussions. Both of the times Favre has had concussions where he has been knocked out for more than 5 seconds, his head had hit the turf (Boren). A lot of major concussions happen when your head hits the surface because of the whiplash effect. The whiplash effect is when your head is traveling at a really fast speed and hits an immovable object. In this case the ground. This also happens in car accidents when your head whips back into the headrest. It makes your brain slide, spin, and hit your skull, which could cause a concussion. If there is new, better shock absorbent turf, the whiplash effect could be less on your brain. A new medicine in development, called Prevacus, could change the way we prevent and treat concussions. It is being researched and developed by Jacob VanLandingham Ph.D., who is a neuroscientist at Florida State University in the department of biomedical sciences (Fleming). As explained by VanLandingham “Prevacus should be taken nasally within minutes of an initial head trauma. Once absorbed into the brain, the drug is said to trigger three different positive reactions--the reduction of inflammation, swelling and stress--at the cellular level. In rats, it's been shown