If I were to tell you that a major college football team went through 2.5 weeks of pre-season football camp, including two-a-day practices and full contact scrimmaging, with zero concussions; would you believe me? With the large number of colleges I guess it is feasible to occur. However, what if this occurred at a football camp where there was a culture to fight concussion with methods to diagnose, manage, treat and PREVENT concussion? Would you suspect that there might be a reason for zero concussions? That is the case with the University of Cincinnati; Zero concussions in 18 days of pre-season camp in conjunction with a thorough program to mitigate and manage concussions.

What is different about UC’s camp is substantial. The 105 plus players were all given training to improve eye-hand coordination, functional peripheral vision, balance, coordination and multitasking. Achieving such training and medical monitoring is no small task and accomplished with the help of an army of engineers, athletic trainers, strength coaches, coaches, physicians and scientists. All of these people dedicated to helping the UC athletes.

Concussions often come from being ‘blindsided’ on the filed so athletes were trained to improve their functional peripheral vision. The Dynavision D2 ™ device was used in part to train functional peripheral vision where athletes had to see lights in their peripheral vision and hit buttons. Quarterbacks were trained to take quick looks at flash cards in their peripheral vision while doing the Dynavision D2 ™.

The players were also trained to respond quickly to improve reaction time. This may make them faster to get out of a situation that might result in injury. Training to improve balance and coordination was performed and simultaneously collecting data to monitor changes in performance when the players were multitasking. The UC medical team developed a novel balance assessment paradigm that monitors and challenges the athletes performance. Balance is important to a football player because once they lose their balance they are prone to injury or poorer performance. The entire football team had balance assessments.

Eye and brain health was assessed as part of baseline management for the entire team. Vision problems occur in a large percentage of concussions and the University of Cincinnati is, we believe, the first University in the country to baseline all of our football players using the state of the art, Optovue – iVue ™ system. This system produces images of the eye, retina and optic nerve head; any of which may be involved in concussion symptoms as well as critical for eye health.

The cutting edge medical care and management for the University of Cincinnati athletes goes past concussion. A group of athletes were enrolled in a research study to determine if prophylactic intravenous fluid therapy prevented dehydration and cramping during the hot practices. The group of athletes who had IV fluids before practice reported feeling better and coaches reported better performance.

The University of Cincinnati continues to lead the way in developing and discovering more and better ways to help our athletes as well as aiding the health of the community and nation. We believe that if other college football programs adopt some of our concussion mitigation training the nation will see fewer athletes sidelined with concussions.

http://www.gobearcats.com/sports/m-footbl/cinn-m-footbl-body.html.

Please note this blog represents the opinion of the author alone and not those of the University of Cincinnati.