Grant: Project Grant

Every year, millions of athletes get concussions from playing contact sports like rugby, football, and hockey. Female athletes are actually more likely to get concussions than male athletes playing the same sport, and when they do get hurt, their symptoms tend to be worse and last longer. Despite this, almost all the research on sports concussions has been done on male athletes. In fact, most studies that doctors use to treat concussions only included males. This means female athletes aren't getting the protection or treatment designed for them. We're tracking university rugby players, both women's and men's teams, for four years using special mouthguards that measure every head impact during practices and games. These high-tech sensors record exactly how hard and how fast the head moves during each hit. We're also taking brain scans and doing brain function tests on smartphones to track how players are doing throughout the season. Using these data, we're building computer models that simulate what happens inside female and male brains during impacts. These models account for important differences, like how female brains tend to be smaller but have different internal structures at the microscopic level that might make them more vulnerable to injury. We're also tracking how quickly athletes recover between hits, since multiple smaller impacts can add up to cause serious problems over time. This research will help us determine safe limits for head impacts specifically for female athletes, understand why they experience worse outcomes, and develop better ways to protect all athletes. We'll finally have evidence-based guidelines that consider biological differences between males and females, rather than assuming what works for men automatically works for women. This could lead to changes in training methods, protective equipment design, and return-to-play protocols that could prevent injuries and protect the long-term brain health of female athletes.