Jamie Roberts is going to play an international rugby match with a brain injury.
There, that’s pretty stark, isn’t it? I wonder if the Welsh team doctors have been that blunt with him.
Because he freely admits in today’s Independent that he was “knocked out cold” at the weekend and has very hazy memories of even leaving the pitch. But he’s been told he’s “fit and ready to go”.
I’m not a health professional, but it doesn’t require a lifetime’s training in the nuances of neurology and neurosurgery to be able to read.
And when you look at even the more accessible research into brain injury, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that a bang on the head is more than something which you shake off in a week.
When you suffer such an injury the basic building blocks of consciousness and coherent thought, the brain cells and the delicate synaptic structures which connect them, are subjected to more than just the physical impact. Chemical reactions, some of which researchers are only just beginning to fully understand, cause invisible damage which takes weeks to repair.
If it happens again before the damage is repaired, the effect is amplified. As a result, having two mild head injuries in just three weeks can be equivalent to a major concussion, with serious long-term effects or even death.
And yes, that’s after a mild traumatic brain injury. We’re not talking here about victims of high speed road traffic collisions or soldiers being battered by high explosives. We are talking about exactly the type of injury where a rugby player is knocked out cold.
A huge upheaval is going on right now in the United States as the NFL faces law suits from former players suffering the horrendous, life-changing consequences of repeated head injuries. A number of different factors are at play in the NFL compared with rugby, not least of which is the level of recklessness traditionally encouraged by wearing a helmet and your own body weight in padding. In an effort to change this culture, the entire sport is having to change the way it coaches young players.
And rugby, a sport in which the players have become significantly bigger, faster and stronger in just a couple of generations, is going to face similar issues in a few years if it isn’t careful. Do all the gym work you want, it doesn’t make your skull thicker, and the energy imparted by those tackles is only getting higher.
And, just by the by, football needs to be more aware of this issue as well. A tragic series of deaths and Fabrice Muamba’s incredibly close call have transformed the sport’s approach to players’ cardiac health. Head injuries could be the sport’s next ticking time bomb.
The signs are not good according to a recent report in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, which looked at clubs’ awareness and use of the Consensus in Sport (CIS) guidelines for assessing concussion.
As reported in Science Omega: “The results revealed that 28 per cent of football clubs had not heard of the CIS guidelines. Only one in 10 clubs carried out concussion symptom scores and just half of teams who were aware of the guidelines used tests to measure both cognitive assessment and symptoms following a concussion.”
I desperately hope Jamie Roberts comes through this weekend in good health. And I hope some young footballer doesn’t find him or herself afflicted with long-term cognitive impairment after returning too soon after a concussion.
But I fear that at some point this issue is going to claim a life.
