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It’s pretty wild as long as the NFL has tried to claim that there’s nothing particularly dangerous about incredibly tall men colliding with each other at high speeds to get to stand still on the ground for a long time. regularly – when you consider that you have spent years turning a blind eye to research on the long-term repercussions of head injuries.
Of course, the league was not the only organization that enjoyed giving priority to the health of its players, as ESPN had no doubt in celebrating the hits in “Jacked Up!” segment that quietly disappeared from the network after conversations about contusions and CTE became too loud to be ignored.
In 2015, a brain study of more than 90 former NFL players who donated the organ to researchers after their deaths found that 96% of them showed evidence of CTE and there were numerous horror stories about athletes who had it deals with the devastating impact of the brutal impact they have been subjected to throughout their careers.
The football world has made progress in addressing the issue in recent years, as leagues have cracked down on headaches and instituted concussion protocols. Companies also continued to refine the design of the headphones to make the game safer, and a few years ago, a group of middle schoolers even developed a way to detect concussions as they happen.
Now on the market there is new equipment that is ready to be a literal game changer when it comes to contact sports, as the FDA recently announced that it has granted its Q-Collar seal of approval, a device that was designed by a group of doctors over seven years who seem to be able to dramatically reduce head trauma when worn.
While the research that led to its creation could have been quite complex, the Q collar itself is quite simple: it is a ring that you wear around your neck that “applies the compressive force that increases the volume of blood to helps reduce brain movement ”- colloquially called“ slosh ”- to minimize the impact of hitting the skull.
The Q collar has been the focus of several clinical trials, and in the one that led to FDA approval, 77% of the 145 high school football players who contributed to its testing did not undergo major changes in the “white matter regions.” of the brain, compared with 73% of non-wearers who had “significant changes” detected in tissue after undergoing an MRI.
Obviously, there is still a lot of work to be done in this realm, because, unlike Rob Gronkowski, it would make you believe, there is no effective way to dramatically reduce CTE symptoms afterwards. That being said, you can only hope that this is a big step in the right direction.