ShareThisWASHINGTON - Youth sports safety advocates say they've made some progress this year in raising awareness about injury risks for young athletes, particularly concussions, heat illness and sudden cardiac arrest.
Yet the 40 sports and health organizations that make up the Youth Sports Safety Alliance concluded Tuesday at a Capitol Hill forum that a yearlong effort to encourage legislation and action toward better medical care, equipment and research has yielded only C-plus results.
At least 49 young athletes, ranging in age from 8 to 18, died taking part in organized sports this year, according to the National Athletic Trainers' Association, the lead member of the alliance.
Some 8,000 children and teens are treated in emergency rooms each day for sports-related injuries, and high school athletes alone sustain more than 2 million injuries each year, 1.4 million of them severe enough to require them to miss at least one day of school.
"What are our young athletics going to have longer, their trophies or their injuries?" challenged NATA President Marjorie Albohm. Her group, working with the National Football League and others, promoted legislation to enhance youth sports safety in 21 states; 15 laws were passed, mostly dealing with concussion care.
While the NFL has made greater efforts toward cleaner hits and better protection of players this season, particularly from concussions, its teams still average one or two concussions per game.
"But for every concussion in the NFL, there are 50,000 in youth sports at all levels (400,000 among high schoolers alone),'' said Dr. Gerald Gioia, director of a concussion program at the Children's National Medical Center in Washington. "We're doing a pretty good job raising awareness of the dangers and building understanding of these injuries, but we're behind in putting the resources, the people, out on the fields to take action when it counts."
No one knows for sure, but experts believe between 30 million and 45 million Americans 18 and under play organized sports each year. A Scripps Howard review of sports medicine in high schools earlier this year found that only about a third of the public and private schools that sponsor interscholastic sports have "full-time" access to an athletic trainer, and coverage is even less likely for younger athletes.
Patti and Bill James hadn't given much thought to the perils of youth sports before their eldest son, Will, 16,collapsed from heat stroke after football practice at his Little Rock, Ark., high school last August. "We had to learn a lot quickly,'' Patti James said. Will spent three weeks in the hospital, including a week in a medically induced coma and three more weeks on dialysis before his kidneys could function again.
Another 16-year-old heat stroke victim was being cared for at Arkansas Children's Hospital at the same time as Will. He died in October. "We shared a lot with his family about our experiences," James said, "and they were so similar but for one thing: Will's school had an athletic trainer who always attends practices and he started working to cool my son immediately; the other boy's school didn't have an athletic trainer."
As the James family has pressed officials in Arkansas to coverage by trainers, many have cited the price as too high for schools systems. (High school athletic trainers make about $40,000 a year, on average.)
"I tell them that Will's care cost $400,000 and the other child's bills ran close to $1 million, in addition to his family's loss,'' James said. "The cost of athletic trainers is so much less than the price of not making changes in how we protect kids from injuries."
Athletic trainers are also at the heart of research into sports injuries. For instance, researchers at have studied high school injuries for more than five years, Nationwide Children's Hospital in Columbus, Ohio, using reports filed by a network of NATA members.
Dawn Comstock, who leads the team, on Tuesday told the group of the latest findings: that concussion symptoms often differ between girls and boys, with females more likely to report sensitivity to noise or light or sleep problems, while males have more problems with memory and learning functions.
"But while we have this type of surveillance for high school injuries, we know almost nothing about younger athletics, and few resources available to help us find out,'' Comstock said.
(Contact Lee Bowman at BowmanL(at)shns.com.)
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, http://www.scrippsnews.com)
