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Sports Concussion Not Limited to Football--Basketball found to be second leading cause of concussions in nation's youth

By Michael Kaplen

This week?s issue of the medical journal Pediatrics reported that about 375,000 children and teenagers are treated in hospital emergency rooms each year for basketball-related injuries.

In 2007, the last year of the study, about 4 percent of youth basketball injuries were to the head, about double the number of such injuries reported by emergency rooms in 1997.

Over all, about 109,000 children and teenagers were treated for basketball-related head injuries during the 11-year study period, including nearly 12,000 in 2007. Among boys, the percentage of head injuries doubled over the period, but among girls, it tripled.

A separate report in Pediatrics found that basketball accounted for more than 9 percent of athletic concussions among 8- to 19-year-olds, placing it second among youth sports, behind only football (22 percent). Soccer ranks third, at 7.7 percent, followed by hockey and baseball, just under 4 percent each.
Basketball?s numbers are inflated, of course, by the large numbers of participants; in terms of individual risk, concussion rates among 12- to 17-year-olds are highest for ice hockey (29 per 10,000 players), followed by football (27), soccer (8), basketball (4) and baseball (3).

Full post as published by Brain Injury News and Information on September 14, 2010 (boomark / email).