Over a million athletes in the United States experience concussions every year. Concussions have been shown to change the flow of blood in the brain; however, while these changes can be identified with MRI scans, researchers believe that there's a more portable, less expensive way of doing so.
Enter the transcranial Doppler (TCD) device.
In a study to be presented at the 68th Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Neurology in Vancouver, Canada, researchers want to show that mapping the brain's blood flow using the TCD makes it easier to more accurately identify concussions off the field.
TCD utilizes ultrasound in mapping out the brain's blood flow. Traditionally, it measured for speed and the pulse of flowing blood in the arteries but these cannot accurately detect concussions. For the study, an advance version of the ultrasound the device uses was utilized to more accurately show how blood moves in one of the brain's major arteries, the middle cerebral artery.
Researchers pooled a group of high school student athletes, 66 of which recently suffered concussions while the other 169 were deemed healthy. Both non-contact and contact sports were represented. Non-contact sports include tennis, track, cycling and cheerleading while contact sports are football, basketball, soccer and hockey while
When brain scans of the athletes were compared, the researchers saw that advanced TCD ultrasound was able to tell concussed and healthy athletes apart 83 percent of the time, compared to the 60 percent that the traditional version of the TCD ultrasound logged.
"While more research is needed, the hope is such a tool could one day be used on the sidelines to help determine more quickly whether an athlete needs further testing," said Robert Hamilton, Ph.D., one of the authors for the study, which was supported by the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health.
According to Randolph Marshall, M.D., M.S., a Science Committee member for the American Academy of Neurology, the researchers' next step is to determine ultimate utility for the technique by testing the TCD ultrasound exactly at the time an injury occurs.
