Elsevier

The Lancet Neurology

Volume 3, Issue 7, July 2004, Pages 435-440
The Lancet Neurology

Forum
Sports neurology

https://doi.org/10.1016/S1474-4422(04)00810-5Get rights and content

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Football neurology

For 15 years, I worked as a doctor for a team that played in the Australian national “Aussie rules” football competition. Since then, although not constrained by a single team commitment, I have continued to look after individuals at an international level in rugby league, rugby union, and soccer.

My first, and in many ways most memorable, moment came in my very first match as a team doctor. At that time, I was an inexperienced medical graduate who had just completed his internship. A colleague

Dealing with neurological injuries in sports: boxing under debate

Since 1990, when the Dutch Government set up strict rules for health issues in contact sports, I have been involved in mandatory annual neuropsychological testing of all professional and top-ranked amateur boxers in the Netherlands. I would like to discuss several difficult neurological health issues in boxers (figure 2)—acute brain injury, the insidious process of boxing dementia, the detection of chronic brain injury in boxers at a very early stage, prevention of cumulative chronic brain

Concussion severity should not be determined until all postconcussion symptoms have abated

Concussion is the most common sport-related head injury. Today, sport-related concussion is a widely recognised major public-health concern in the USA and worldwide. Initially, it was thought that concussion produced only a temporary disturbance of brain function caused by neuronal, chemical, or neuroelectrical changes without structural change. We now know that structural damage with loss of brain cells does occur with some concussions.

In the past decade, the neurobiology of cerebral

Neurological problems in breath-hold diving

Snorkelling and breath-hold diving are enjoyed by millions of people around the world. Although most people dive to a few meters below the surface for less than 1 min at a time, dives to depths of 30 m or more, lasting 1–2 mins, are routine for spear-fishermen during competitions. There are also a few elite breath-hold divers (figure 3) who constantly try to outdo each other in order to establish depth records, which have recently exceeded 150 m. These deep record dives typically last 3–3·5

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