On February 10, the Concussion Panel, an assortment of hockey experts including ex-pros like Eric Lindros and specialists like Dr. Charles Tator, professor of neurosurgery at the University of Toronto, gathered together to review the problems of long term brain injury in their sport.
They then suggested the essentially unthinkable: that fighting should be banned from hockey.
Personally, I'm an indifferent. I think there's no sport that works better in person and worse on TV than hockey and since I live in a state without a team my interest is limited to a few games during the playoffs and the occasional finals. I don't watch the game enough to miss the fights, but die-hard fans hate the idea of a ban.
Not only do fans enjoy a good fight, but experts have also argued that without fighting there would be more illegal stick fouls, checks from behind and other infractions--all of which, some argue, would lead to more serious injuries than concussions.
Well, not so fast.
For a while we've known about links between concussions and increased rates of depression, mild cognitive impairment and earlier onset of Alzheimer's disease in aging sports' stars, but most of this work has been done in retired NFL players so much less is known about these effects in younger athletes.
Until now. New research published yesterday in the Journal of Neurotrauma found that there are even more long term consequences than previously believed.
Scientists at the University of Illinois ran 90 student athletes-half of whom had suffered a concussion sometime in the last 3.5 years-through a battery of tests, including a measurement of what's known as P3b amplitude-essentially a measurement of the amount of attentional resources allocated towards a stimulus in the environment.
Everyone who had previously suffered a concussion tested poorly here, meaning, it now appears, that even in the short term suffering a concussion hinder one's ability to update working memory.
What this means in the long term is this effect magnifies over time. A concussion suffered now gets worse later. Essentially, going to school to learn and going to school to play a violent sport (hockey, rugby, football) may be working at exactly cross purposes.
Concurrently, research published in the March issue of Pediatrics and done by the Nationwide Children's Hospital found that one-out-of-four kids who suffer a concussion end up with post-concussive symptoms, including trouble paying attention and, well, you guessed it, memory loss.
Since about half-a-million kids end up with concussions every year-that one concussion a minute if you're keeping score at home-or just a boatload of people. Even worse, because doctors don't have a way to measure the effects of multiple concussions (something that authors of the Nationwide Children's Hospital study are pushing for), kids who suffer these are often misdiagnosed and mistreated, thus exacerbating the situation in the long term.
All of which raises my original question: should fighting be banned from hockey? Hard to say. Maybe we could just ban thinking among ex-hockey players.
