Trends In Concussion Incidence In High School Sports

Football, an American pastime. It has become a tradition for families to gather in local stadiums on Fridays, or around the television on Sundays to watch athletes compete against each other in a game of athleticism and brute strength. People cheer as athletes give their all, even their lives, for a sport that has no benefits for them. Football is a disease. It started out small and insignificant and the people or players barely noticed the impacts it had on their lives. Now football is so intertwined with our culture that a procedure to remove it might very well bring a collapse of our influence. The American people are left with no option, we must remove football now and suffer the consequences or else damn ourselves to punishment tenfold.

However in "Trends in Concussion Incidence in High School Sports: A Prospective 11-Year Study", The American Journal of Sports Medicine found that from 1997 to 2008 the concussion rates in football had increased by an alarming 8% annually. In fact high school football accounts for over 50% of all high school concussions. And around 1 in 5 high school athletes will suffer a concussion. The big worry in football isn’t so much one or two concussions, even though these events can be very severe and have a negative impact on kid’s lives. What is the most damaging is a few concussions and many sub-concussive hits. These are blows to the head where an athlete may experience just one or even no concussion symptoms. They seem insignificant and many have no immediate effect, but over time the build upon each other. These blows combined with concussions cause life altering diseases such as CTE, Parkinson’s, and Alzheimer’s. Many people are familiar with Parkinson’s or Alzheimer’s, you probably know someone who suffers from these diseases. CTE on the other hand was only discovered in 2002 by Dr. Bennett Omalu. It is a degenerative brain disease with a strong link to head trauma. CTE is caused by a progressive buildup of the tau protein which

Not necessarily because it causes injuries, though that is bad. Nor, because it destroys lives academically and fiscally, but because it ends lives. That is the simply unavoidable outcome of football. It comes with the sport itself, in Ancient Rome spectators cheered while men ended each other 's lives. Today we continue that tradition in a different form, in football. While the death rate in football may seem low, the fact remains that it is the second deadliest sport in the entire world. The only sport more dangerous than football is motorsports, which include far more participants and a much more obvious risk. Not only is Football dangerous to the players, it is also detrimental to the roots of American culture. Football is a sport popular almost exclusively in the U.S. and Canada. It has never come close to the world-wide popularity of sports such as soccer or even hockey. That is because many foreigners see football as an uncultured, barbaric, and dangerous sport. Ivan Yurchenko a journalist from Russia took an internship at the Seattle Times documented his first viewing of a football game. In his article Ivan wrote “how odd it is that the players deploy such aggression against one another” and “Twenty-two burly guys in helmets ran around together, slamming into each other in the struggle for a small ball. Running around, knock, stop!”. America is looked upon as the pinnacle of Democracy and Western Civilization, it