Health & Safety

If you want your youth athlete to arrive at practices and games well-hydrated, and to maintain that status during and after sports, it stands to reason that educating them about the benefits of proper hydration could make a difference? But does it?  MomsTEAM's hydration expert says the studies suggest that education alone doesn't work.

The risk of sustaining a concussion in high school football is not effected by the brand, age or recondition status of the helmet, nor by the type of mouth guard worn, says a new study in the American Journal of Sports Medicine finds.

Athletes who didn't get enough sleep the night before undergoing baseline concussion testing didn't perform as well as expected, say researchers presenting their work at the American Orthopaedic Society for Sports Medicine's 2013 Annual Meeting in Chicago, IL.

NOCSAE warns parents, players, coaches, and administrators to consider the limitations in Virginia Tech's STAR ratings for football helmets and not to overemphasize the role helmets play in protecting against concussions at the expense of focusing attention on other steps that have a more immediate and much greater impact on concussion reduction.

Concussed high school football players who experience symptoms of post-traumatic migraine (PTM), such as headache, nausea, and sensitivity to light or noise, are more cognitively impaired and take longer to recover than those reporting headache without migraine-based symptoms or no headache at all, says a new study.

Children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) who sustain mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI) such as concussion are more likely to be moderately disabled after injury than those who sustain mTBI without ADHD, finds a new study, which suggests that children with ADHD be encouraged to avoid contact sports that put them at increased risk of TBI. 

in 2013, an Inter-Association Task Force for Preventing Sudden Death in Secondary School Athletics Programs published a series of recommendations, including urging all high schools to have an AT on staff to take care of emergency situations and provide care for student athletes.

While ankle sprains remain one of the most common injuries in sports, accounting for more than 45 percent of all athletic injuries according to some estimates, they are not all alike, so it is important that each patient have an individualized treatment plan, recommends a new position statement from the National Athletic Trainers' Association (NATA). 

Headaches are the most commonly reported symptom of concussion, but could be the result of a disorder called trauma-triggered migraines (TTMs) and not the result of a concussion, says a new case study and literature review.

Nearly 350,000 people suffer cardiac arrest annually.   Because cardiac arrest leads to the death of one youth athlete every three days in the United States, sports parents should know how to perform CPR and use an AED, which can significantly increase a victim's chances of survival.