SPENCER VAN DYK 
The Fulcrum (University of Ottawa)

OTTAWA (CUP) — The risk of concussion comes along with many sports. By the time athletes reach the university sport level, many of them will have experienced at least one concussion, and many have suffered several.

Blaine Hoshizaki, a professor at the University of Ottawa, specializes in this type of head injury and is studying the mechanisms of concussions and the risk factors associated with specific sports and injuries. Concussions may seem like a common occurrence, especially in sport, but they can do serious damage to your brain.

“The brain is relatively soft,” Hoshizaki explained. “What happens is it actually gets sheared. It’s like Jell-O. If you try to compress it, it won’t compress, but if you shear it, that’s what a concussion is. What people don’t realize is that the brain is mostly liquid and jelly-like. The brain only has to move three to five millimetres, and that’s the damage. The brain is very robust, but if you hit it hard enough, it damages the tissue and can interfere with the physiology.”

Athletes, especially those who have grown up in the culture of contact sports, are generally familiar with concussions and the risks of head injuries. One such group of athletes is the University of Ottawa Gee-Gees women’s hockey team.

“These players have been playing for 15 or more years, so they’re aware of those dangers,” said hockey coach Yanick Evola. “It happens quite a bit. With the girls getting better and better, hitting harder shots and skating faster, they’re at a higher risk, unfortunately. It happened last year, and it happened this year; it’s a pretty frequent thing.”

Hoshizaki seeks to connect the circumstances of the injury with their outcome and effects. According to him, there are two types of injury that cause concussions: rotational dynamic head injuries and linear dynamic head injuries.

A rotational dynamic head injury occurs in a situation like being punched in the jaw. Hoshizaki explained that getting hit in the jaw or on the chin can create high angular acceleration, which could knock you out. Alternately, falling and hitting your head, causing it to stop suddenly, is considered a linear dynamic head injury. The consequences of these two types of injuries are comparable, but affect different parts of the brain in various ways.

“What we do primarily is try to understand the mechanisms of concussions and relate the event to the risk of injury,” Hoshizaki said. “If someone has a concussion, we can then recreate the injury to understand how the brain tissue is affected from that particular accident. It’s almost like a forensic [science] in that we take in the information about how the event occurred and then we reconstruct it so we can get the dynamic response of the head. We then take that dynamic response to the head to create a model of the brain and skull, which allows us to calculate the strain on the brain tissue.”

Samantha Delenardo, a former forward for the Gee-Gees women’s hockey team, says she has experienced three concussions that she can remember.

Delenardo suffered her first concussion while playing junior hockey. “That was a pretty bad one; I was out for about a month,” she said. “Immediately after I got hit, I forgot the score of the game. I knew where I was, but mostly forgot important details. Since then, I’ve been more susceptible to them.” Delenardo’s second concussion happened when she took a slapshot to the side of her head. Her last concussion came during a Gee Gees’ practice during her final year with the squad. “I hit a teammate, and she’s a lot heavier than me, so I got the worst of it. I don’t remember much from it. I was benched for about a month and a half.”

According to Delenardo, concussions occur more commonly in sports like hockey, football and boxing. In the case of football, hits to the head and using the head as a weapon have become basic parts of the sport.

In hockey, Evola says, being at a two-foot distance from the boards puts athletes at a higher risk of being pushed into the boards or falling on the ice — a risk players are aware of.

“You don’t really talk about it until it happens, but just growing up in the culture, you’re aware of what a concussion is, and as soon as you have one, obviously you know what the symptoms are and how to treat it a little bit,” she said.

Hoshizaki said the treatment of concussions and other head injuries depends not only on the circumstances but also on the brain itself, and that side effects and consequences from these types of injuries are unpredictable.

“In some cases, people can fall down and get right back up,” Hoshizaki said. “In other cases, they can get knocked out. That is partly because of the parts of the brain that are involved and the effect, so it’s quite unpredictable.”

There are some aspects of concussions that remain a mystery to Hoshizaki.

“What we’re trying to understand is why in some cases, you can have relatively low trauma, but symptoms will persist and possibly never go away. You have to be very careful when you get back into play. Some studies are showing that even if you show no symptoms, the brain can still be compromised, so you need to be very conservative with getting back into play.”

Concussions are “going to happen,” Delenardo said. “It falls on you and it falls on the staff to make sure you take care of it and you can return to the game safely.”

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Graphic: Mathias Macphee/The Fulcrum