Concussions Of Young Football Players

With the movie "Concussion" appearing in theatre 's last December, I took it upon myself to dive deeper into the subject. This time with the same concept, but with a different group of football players. More specifically, the young football players in which the injuries received, being both minor and major injuries, contributes to the development of their brain structures. Within each hit these young players take, the still growing brain comes to a halt every time the team makes a tackle that damages the brain further than most humans do throughout their lifetime. Many different scientists have been conducting experiments to provide proof of how concussions can cause a decline in lifespan of young football players. Some may ask, what is a concussion?

Many different investigations were started in order to connect CTE (Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy) to football. These investigations succeeded, even though some took longer to be recognized due to the fact of how important American football is to the U.S.A., but nonetheless it was known that NFL players were at a high risk for CTE and the only way to fix it is to stop playing football. During studies like the NFL case in 2002, there was a big riot about NFL and how it impacts the football fans, but they never focused on how the injuries start to stack up into CTE. The scientists that focus towards the beginning of a football athletes rate of concussions start to see the a distortion in the brain. Scientists like Dr. Christopher Whitlow, who did an experiment on 25 boys around mid teens and used helmets to record brain activity while playing football. Whitlow found the "white matter" was not forming properly than what a normal teenagers brain should look like (Whitlow

Even though countless hours of research has been made, there is still no definite answer to tell if a person has CTE in the brain or not, but the way to test it is only through an autopsy of the deceased (Mayo 1). CTE can still be linked between football players, it all depends on the signs and symptoms of both the brain and the actual person. Inside the head the brain is made up of thousands of different components that have each individual functions. Some components, such as short-term memory, consist of brain tissue that houses the neurons that send electrical charges to and from the brain. When CTE is a factor in these components, the brain can 't deliver the electrical charge the components that have CTE in the white matter. Since the brain can 't give signals to specific parts of itself, the body starts to shut down some of its functions due to the decaying brain tissues that start to form as soon as the CTE takes over. The functions being shut down are the same signs and symptoms of when a football player has had reoccurring concussions during their football seasons. But again, the only to actually see the evidence is to look deep inside the brain and the only way to do that is to perform an autopsy on the body. Mainly scientists use deceased football players when viewing CTE at a closer viewpoint to get a better understanding of what they are