Natasha Helmick goes up for a header during a soccer match and gets speared in the left temple by an opponent. The 14-year-old, a talented center midfielder playing in the choice Lake Highlands Girls Classic League, crumples to the ground. She can't see anything out of her left eye. Her coach asks if she's okay, but Natasha lies and says she's good to go. The coach puts her back into the lineup and she plays the remainder of the game, even though one eye sees darkness while floaters and sparkly objects dance in front of the other. She plays later that day, too, still without full eyesight. Her vision will eventually return, but five years and four concussions later, she's unable to recall much of her childhood.
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Natasha Helmick's athletic career effectively ended in the Lake Highlands Girls Classic League.
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Speaking to her now, you wouldn't know that Natasha, who was forced to give up an athletic scholarship to Texas State University-San Marcos, is a brain-damaged 19-year-old. "Academically," says her mother, Micky Helmick, "everything is three times harder."
Across the country, people have awakened to the sometimes irreversible damage of concussions, especially in high-impact professional sports. With much of the attention focused on the National Football and National Hockey leagues, reporting by Village Voice Media, which publishes the Observer, has revealed even more dire consequences for youth athletes, who are bigger and more aggressive than in past generations and often play year-round.
The effects of a concussion can be more devastating for young people; doctors say that until a person is in his early to mid-20s, his brain is not fully developed and can't take the same level of trauma as an adult brain can. Postmortem analysis, the only surefire way to measure concussions' devastating effects, shows that repeated blows to the head may be linked with Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, ALS and a number of other fatal diseases. And even a young athlete who doesn't exhibit outward signs of a concussion (headaches, dizziness, vomiting, temporary amnesia) can still experience changes in brain activity similar to those in a player who has been clinically diagnosed with a concussion, making the challenge of managing head injuries even more difficult for trainers and coaches, who are often part-time and under-trained.
Twenty state governments and the District of Columbia have signed concussion legislation this year alone, prohibiting athletes from returning to play until cleared by a licensed physician. But the ImPACT test, widely regarded as the go-to neurological exam to measure concussive blows, doesn't always accurately gauge a player's readiness to return to action.
Meanwhile, as attorneys debate how the new concussion laws will play out, kids like Natasha Helmick, whose memory struggles sometimes resemble those of an elderly person, continue to battle a condition that puts parents who want the best for their children in an interesting position: Would they have pushed them be standouts in athletics if they realized that in some cases, their kids could be harmed for life by their participation in elite sports?
For Ali Champness, it was a freak ball kicked into her face by her own goalie in practice that turned her life upside down. The 14-year-old freshman, who'd already made junior varsity at Garces Memorial, a Catholic high school in Bakersfield, California, told her parents the sting went away after a little while. Two days later, though, on the way to a game, Ali complained of a headache and dizziness.
The ball had only "brushed across the front of [Ali's] face," says her mother, Kim Champness. "It was not a hard hit at all, but right after that, she started stuttering."
Ali saw a doctor, who discovered a number of serious problems. In the past, a "bell ringer" was considered no different from a cut or a sprained ankle: part of the game. Until a few years ago, the NFL's medical committee on concussions published studies that concluded players were not suffering long-term damage from head trauma incurred during athletic competition.
The lack of awareness carried over to the training rooms of every sport, and athletes were prematurely sent back into action. Years later, it became obvious that many of them were losing their minds. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that as many as 3.8 million sports- and recreation-related concussions occur each year. Out of this figure, about 235,000 are hospitalized and 50,000 die, according to the CDC.
"Ninety percent of concussions went undiagnosed," Chris Nowinski, of the Boston-based Sports Legacy Institute, says. "In fact, today you can talk to an athlete and ask the amount of concussions they've had and give them the actual definition, and that number will increase."
Nowinski, a former World Wrestling Entertainment pro and author of Head Games: Football's Concussion Crisis, founded the Sports Legacy Institute with neurosurgeon Dr. Robert Cantu. The foundation works with Boston University's Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy in performing post-death pathology on brains donated by former athletes.
One of the latest specimens examined was that of former Chicago Bear Dave Duerson, who earlier this year, following years of dementia and depression, shot himself to death in the chest so his brain would be preserved. Neurologists later confirmed that Duerson had been afflicted with chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a neurodegenerative disease linked to the total amount of distress a brain receives during a lifetime. Because a concussed person may not always exhibit classic symptoms such as headaches and nausea, CTE is, in essence, an invisible killer that can cause the brain of a 35-year-old to resemble that of an 80-year-old.
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