According to a recent study, researchers at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center have developed a new way to measure the cumulative effect of impacts to the head suffered by football players.
The metric, "Risk Weighted Cumulative Exposure," measures frequency and magnitude of impacts suffered by players throughout the season, analyzing both linear and rotational acceleration to determine an athlete's risk of injury.
"This metric gives us a way to look at a large number of players and the hits they've incurred while playing football," says Joe Stitzel, chair of biomedical engineering at Wake Forest Baptist and the senior author of the study. "We know that young players are constantly experiencing low-level hits that don't cause visible injury, but there hasn't been a good way to measure the associated risk of concussion."
For more information on the study, see the article from Medical News Today.
