R
ecovering from a concussion typi-
cally takes female athletes more
than twice as long as males, accord-
ing to a new study that tracked hundreds of
teenagers active in sports. The finding adds
to a growing body of evidence that vulner-
ability to this injury—and aspects of the
healing process—may vary by sex.
A handful of studies published since the
mid-2000s have suggested that girls in
high school and college may sustain a
higher rate of these injuries on the playing
field than boys do, and investigations over
the last few years have indicated they may
also take longer to recover. As a result,
when sports medicine researchers and ex-
perts convened in Berlin last fall for the 5th
International Consensus Conference on
Concussion in Sport, their subsequent
statement cited evidence girls were more
likely to suffer concussions that required a
more lengthy recovery period than their
male counterparts did. “But there wasn’t
enough data to [definitively] say that this
was the case,” says John Neidecker, a sports
medicine physician with the Orthopaedic
Specialists of North Carolina. “We thought
that we’d take a look back at the athletes
that we saw over a three-year period and
actually [provide] some objective data.”
Neidecker and his colleagues analyzed
the medical records of 212 middle and high
school athletes who visited a sports medi-
cine practice in southern New Jersey—
boys and 102 girls—who had experienced
their first concussion while playing an orga-
nized sport such as football, field hockey or
wrestling. (Only initial head injuries were
considered to rule out the possible effect of
prior incidents.) Their analysis revealed the
median recovery time for girls was 28 days—
more than double that of boys, which was 11
days. The results appeared in the Journal of
Girls in high school and college may sustain a higher rate of injuries on the playing field than boys do.
PEDRO BLANCO
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