Sport P.E.I. promotes new concussion guidelines aimed at protecting young athletes

Sport P.E.I. is promoting new international guidelines designed to protect young athletes from sport-related concussions, and to speed up their recovery and return to sport if they do suffer one.  

Many of the changes are focused around contact sports, including hockey, football and rugby. 

"They now are saying that mouthguards make a big difference — a 28 per cent reduction in concussions with contact sports," said Randy Goodman, Sport P.E.I.'s athlete health and performance director and a clinical specialist in sports physiotherapy.

"The other thing is reducing impact or collisions or hitting in hockey. If you reduce body checking in hockey in adolescents ... it reduces concussions up to 58 per cent of the time."

He said another prevention measure is "reducing full-hit practices in football so that you still do some, but you don't do a lot of it, and you save that hitting for the games."

Goodman said there are also updated tools for sideline evaluation of sport-related concussions, one for coaches and parents, and another for health-care professionals.

"They've recommended that you should do a fairly comprehensive assessment if you think the person's had a concussion. So you need to pull them out of the sport, get them in a quiet area and do a full-on concussion evaluation that takes about 10 to 15 minutes," Goodman said.

Another recommendation is that competition officials have health-care professionals present during events that are at a higher risk for concussions "to make those determinations, to make sure it's safe for the player."

Goodman said P.E.I. is gradually increasing the number of health-care professionals knowledgeable about sport-related concussions.  "We have many more practitioners now who are qualified to do concussion management than we had, say, five years ago. So it's coming," he said.

 "We've posted the guidelines on our website so people can see what the changes are, and we're doing some education for primary health practitioners, sport practitioners and coaches over the next six weeks."

Goodman said there is a seven-step process to manage how an athlete will return to sport after a concussion, with some significant changes around how a person can recover.

"It actually shows that people get better faster if we actually do some early exercise, by day one, day two. But that needs to be supervised to manage heart rate," he said.

"Exercise increases circulation to your brain so it helps it actually heal, but if you do too much, then you'll push the symptoms over the edge and then you have to back off," he said.

"The other interesting thing is they came out fairly strong saying that you need to limit screen time for 24 to 48 hours after a concussion, and I think that's important, just to give your neurons in your brain a rest."