By Terry Kosdrosky

Public Engagement & Impact

There’s been great advancement in the diagnosis, care, and prevention of concussions in recent years. But there are still unknowns about long-term effects and who is more prone to suffer them.

In this episode of Michigan Minds, Biosciences Initiative grantee and School of Kinesiology professor Steven Broglio talks about how the Michigan Concussion Center aims to answer those questions.

It’s this kind of research and data that has led to rule changes and player care in contact sports such as football and hockey.

But while sports get a lot of headlines when it comes to concussions, the center’s research isn’t limited to athletes. People can also suffer concussions from vehicle accidents, and military deployments have led to a large number of concussions in veterans.

Broglio says the long-term studies underway are aimed at helping uncover mysteries with hard data in order to improve treatment and prevention. Researchers like Broglio also want to correct some of the misinformation in popular media about concussions.

“I’ve been doing concussion research for close to 20 years now, and when I started it was kind of viewed as a blow-off injury,” he says. “If somebody had loss of consciousness on the field we’d put them back in 15 minutes later. So we’ve come a long way since then. That being said, there’s still a lot that we don’t know. I’d say the biggest single issue that we don’t have an understanding on is what the long-term effects are.”

You can download and subscribe to Michigan Minds from wherever you listen to podcasts — Apple Podcasts, Google Play, SoundCloud, Stitcher, and Spotify.