If you watch any level of high-contact sports; you may start to notice something called a Q-collar around a few of the athletes' necks. There has been a lot of news coverage and questions coming out about what these devices are, and if they are the next step in concussion prevention. You may have heard about all of the new versions of football helmets and guardian caps that the athletes are testing to see if it lowers the amount of brain damage received from the repeated hits their heads sustain. It is known that “10% of all contact sport athletes sustain concussions yearly” (Sadler et al., 2012). There is also evidence from many sources including the CDC that state; “There are an estimated 1.7 to 3.8 million traumatic brain injuries each year in the United States. Amongst American children and adolescents, sports and recreational activities contribute to over 21 percent of all traumatic brain injuries” (Traumatic Brain Injury, 2015). A traumatic brain injury is caused when the brain hits the skull both front and back or side to side. There are other issues including that players take many multifactorial hits over time. Not all of them occur in traumatic brain injury but still do harm to the fibers of the brain. Many steps and inventions have been produced that help address this issue from the outside of the body. However, the Q-collar is worn externally, but its protection shows itself on the inside.
The manner in which the Q-collar works is surprisingly simple. You place it around the lower portion of your neck and it presses lightly on your internal jugular veins. Although it sounds uncomfortable, it is described by all that wear it as very light pressure you no longer notice after a few minutes. This pressure on the IJV increases the blood volume around your brain inside of your skull. This makes it so you no longer get the motion back and forth and do not have motion of the brain along the inner tables of your skull. If the brain does hit the skull it preserves the brain structure during impact.
There have been over 25 clinical trials on large numbers of individuals at many levels of competition. Many of these trials include measurable objective findings on the MRI imaging where they took scans before and after seasons for athletes wearing the Q-collar and those that did not wear it. The teams that participated were divided and put into groups that wore it and those that did not. The results resoundingly showed a difference in the groups that wore the collar vs those that did not. This showed an 80% reduction on average of brain fiber damage with those that wore the collar.
I believe in time that we will see more and more athletes wearing this device as this research gets out there.
Administrator. (2015, March 4). Traumatic brain injury. Korey Stringer Institute. Retrieved November 22, 2022, from https://ksi.uconn.edu/emergency-conditions/traumatic-brain-injury/#
Sahler, C. S., & Greenwald, B. D. (2012, July 9). Traumatic brain injury in sports: A Review. Rehabilitation research and practice. Retrieved November 22, 2022, from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3400421/
Mitchell - as someone who has a particular interest in traumatic brain injuries, I was so excited reading this - how awesome!! This makes a great deal of sense, however I would have never even thought of this as a preventative avenue. I am thinking, however - could this be recreated pharmacologically? Although this would, naturally, be more invasive than a simple collar around the neck, I dug a bit to see if this was possible. As expected, certain vasodilators, specifically sodium nitroprusside (usually used for hypertension), and nitroglycerine (a nitrate commonly used for angina), may lead to increased ICP (Thiagarajah et. al, 1991). Naturally, ICP is touchy and must be regulated with extreme caution, however I wonder if perhaps we may soon hear about athletes in high-contact sports reaching for the pill bottle for the same effect.
ReplyDeleteThiagarajah, S., Lear, E., & Azar, I. (1991). The effects of oxytocin on intracranial pressure. Journal of neurosurgical anesthesiology, 3(4), 270–272. https://doi.org/10.1097/00008506-199112000-00005
This is amazing to think that such simple device could protect the brain from concussion, especially when the force of impact is crazily high. Did you know that a mild traumatic brain injury often results from forces that are up to 106g applied directly to the head, or 80g-90g for a span of 4 milliseconds? If a footballer who is 250lbs, running at a speed of 5m/s before he collides with another one and stopping after 4 ms, the player's head would experience 127.5g, which is equivalent to being crushed by 31,855 lbs! With all of the negative consequences of concussion, including permanent brain damages, I personally think that football is a sport that should be banned!
ReplyDeletehttps://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/735057_4?icd=ssl_login_gg_221129
https://www.omnicalculator.com/physics/car-crash-force