Brain Injury Category Archives — Page 2 of 7 — DC Medical Malpractice & Patient Safety Blog Published by Washington, D.C. Personal Injury Lawyers

January 25, 2019

What’s prodding contact sports’ big shifts on head trauma? Insurance companies’ ‘panic’

Parents and young athletes may have wrestled with the decision whether to play contact sports, as research shows the injuries that players can suffer from blows to the head. But lesser known parties to the games may be the undoing of professional and organized soccer, hockey, and football: Insurance companies.

The firms, which provide necessary and invaluable protections to players and organizations by spreading the financial risks of harms, have fled professional and amateur sports, declining to offer them coverages, even at high costs, Steve Fainaru and Mark Fainaru-Wada of ESPN’s Outside the Lines program reported.

Insurers are balking not only at providing liability policies but also worker compensation for pros, ESPN says. The dearth of coverage has hit hard the NFL, collegiate and Pop Warner programs, as well as football helmet makers. They’re forced to hunt far and wide for the few firms willing to assume sports risks — and they pay high and accordingly, if they can get policies.

November 23, 2018

NHL short-changes players and medical science in concussion settlement

by Patrick A. Malone

The National Hockey League, with its new settlement of claims on head injuries, has done the sport and its most important component — players, past, present, and future — no service. Instead, the game’s leaders have shown a disregard for factual medical science, and an excess appreciation for profits over people.

In contrast to the $1-billion concussion accord between the National Football League and its players, the NHL deal is parsimonious, amounting to $19 million or so. It breaks down, in brief, in this way, according to ESPN:

The settlement calls for a payment of at least $22,000 for settling plaintiffs and settling unfiled claims. Besides the cash payout, the NHL’s settlement involves neurological testing and assessment for players paid for by the league, as well as an administrative fund to pay for the costs and up to $75,000 in medical treatment for players who test positive on two or more tests. The settlement also calls for a ‘Common Good Fund’ that would support retired players in need. That would include players who did not participate in the litigation. The NHL also agreed to pay almost $7 million in plaintiff legal fees.

September 28, 2018

In renewed call for baby walker ban, a reminder how hazards hang around

by Patrick A. Malone

Little ones may prove to be a handful to get around, but grownups need to be wary of products to make babies mobile.

Child safety advocates have not only re-upped their warnings, in particular, about infant walkers, but based on a new study of data from hundreds of thousands of emergency room visits between 1990 and 2014, experts have called on federal regulators anew to ban the manufacture and sale of this product across the country.

Researchers found that “more than 230,000 children under 15 months old were treated in U.S. hospital emergency departments for skull fractures, concussions, broken bones and other injuries related to infant walkers,” National Public Radio reported.

September 14, 2018

Common sense on kids and concussions, adult heart disease, frats and booze

by Patrick A. Malone

Common sense and moderation can matter a ton in maintaining good health, as recent news reports show, particularly with kids and concussions, middle-aged adults and heart disease, and collegiate alcohol abuse.

With youngsters returning to school and so many of them participating in sports and recreation programs, it’s good that the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has issued evidence-based guidance on protecting kids who suffer mild traumatic brain injury or what most of us would call concussions.

These injuries have become a growing concern for parents and young athletes. Sports leagues and sporting groups are coming to a time of reckoning with just how harmful head trauma can be.

September 6, 2018

As 2018 season kicks off, college football reckons with head trauma harms

by Patrick A. Malone

College football has kicked off its fall season with a flourish, but the signs are increasing that concerns about players’ health and safety may slash at the game’s size, spectacle, and importance.

Just as the pro leagues were forced to answer in court for the harms that athletes suffer due to repeated blows to their heads, the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) has been hit with claims in the civil justice system, asserting wrongful deaths of players from the recent past.

Lawsuits, believed to be part of what will be a wave, were filed against the college sports conference on behalf of the survivors and estates of a onetime University of Southern California fullback and a University of California at Los Angeles running back.

August 24, 2018

Millions of teens suffer concussions as experts link head trauma to suicide risk

by Patrick A. Malone

Rigorous researchers avoid leaping to unfounded conclusions, but it’s hard not to look at two separate studies on areas of high current interest and just go “Hmmm ….”

In the first work, experts from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention analyzed available reports and surveys to find that 15.1 percent of American high school students or 2.5 million or so “reported having at least one of these concussions” in the most recent year, while 6 percent reported two or more concussions.

The researchers said:

August 21, 2018

Maryland tragedy underscores need for tough safeguards for players’ health

by Patrick A. Malone

In College Park, Md., new cooling tents have sprouted on the University of Maryland’s football practice field, where the training staff also is taking pains now to provide adequate cold drinks and breaks to players. Observers say the pre-season regimens, however, are not only marked by greater attentiveness to the young athletes’ needs, they’re also eerily quiet and somber.

That’s because top Terps leaders have apologized and conceded the school shares blame for the tragic and preventable heat stroke death of Jordan McNair, 19, a Maryland offensive lineman. Coaches forced the young man to run and over-exert himself during a May 29 practice. More importantly, they failed to diagnose the severity of his condition, neglecting to so much as take his pulse and blood pressure, and, in a disputed account, not noticing that he was suffering seizures, or acting fast to drop his body temperature with ice and cooling baths.

Published reports suggest he showed heatstroke signs before 5 that afternoon, though trainers did not call for emergency help and an ambulance until nearly 6, when his body temperature may have hit 106 degrees. He was admitted to a hospital, where nurses and doctors immersed him in a cooling bath and reduced his temperature to 102 degrees — 90 minutes or so after he apparently got into distress.

August 15, 2018

NFL settlements raise new questions on head trauma and Parkinson’s and ALS

by Patrick A. Malone

The National Football League, which long has resisted the growing reality that game-related head blows can cause major harms to its players, may be providing yet new and unintended warnings about the sustained damages of concussions.

The Los Angeles Times reported that pro football’s pay-outs, as part of its billion-dollar head-injuries settlement with NFL players and their union, have been surprisingly high in cases where retirees have claimed damages due to Parkinson’s and ALS.

Parkinson’s, the newspaper noted, is a “progressive movement disorder that produces tremors, impaired movement, and slurred speech.” It is “marked by the buildup of proteins called Lewy bodies in brain cells.” ALS, also known as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis or Lou Gehrig’s disease, is a condition affecting “nerve cells in the brain and spinal cord and ultimately results in a fatal inability to initiate and control muscle movement.”

July 6, 2018

NHL sells its players short by failing to acknowledge harms of head blows

by Patrick A. Malone

The 2018 Stanley Cup may rest for a bit as the pride and joy of enthusiasts in the nation’s capital and of its title-winning team. But as fans of the pro and amateur game look to the future, they may have reason to be downcast about hockey’s most important component: its players.

Author Ken Dryden (photo above, left) has important things to say about them, because he was a goaltender for the Montreal Canadiens and has been enshrined in the Hockey Hall of Fame. The onetime Canadian parliamentarian has pointed out that owners and bosses in the National Hockey League, as illustrated by videotapes of their sworn testimony in a long-running court case, are locking arms and taking a counter-factual position on the damages that players may suffer due to blows to the head they receive in games.

In “infuriating” fashion, NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman (photo above, right), Boston Bruins owner and chairman of the league’s Board of Governors Jeremy Jacobs, other team owners, senior league executives and doctors are playing ostriches, Dryden wrote in a recent Op-Ed in the Washington Post. They’re sticking their head in the sand, insisting that hockey has no issue at all with “chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE. That’s a degenerative brain disease that has been found in athletes including professional hockey and football players, as well as soldiers and others who have suffered repeated brain injuries. Symptoms of CTE include cognitive impairment, depression, emotional instability and suicidal thoughts.”

May 31, 2018

A bit of optimism for the 65+: a dozen years on average of cognitive health

by Patrick A. Malone

As many as five million Americans already have Alzheimer’s and other dementia-related conditions, and their resulting loss of cognitive capacity and personal control rank among the top causes for health dread among those 55 and older, polls show. So it’s worth noting that new studies are showing that seniors 65 and older get on average a dozen years of good cognitive health ── and that span is expanding.

Further, the onset of problems typically may occur in relatively mild fashion, with the most serious cognitive decline occurring in a short but late period of 18 months or so, Judith Graham reported for the independent, nonpartisan Kaiser Health News Service.

In her story for the KHNS feature “Navigating Aging,” Graham looks at an array of the latest and reliable research on seniors and cognitive decline, finding glimmers of optimism in what has been increasingly gloomy, evidence-based studies on how huge a challenge may be posed for our fast-graying nation by dementia, Alzheimer’s and their care.