Grant: CIHR Fellowship

Every year in Canadian emergency departments, 46,000 Canadian children are diagnosed with a concussion, constituting a significant public health concern. Determining when it is safe for children with concussion to return to sport is critical to prevent prolonged recovery or reinjury and international guidelines recommend balance testing as an essential part of concussion assessment and recovery tracking. Balance problems persist weeks beyond the initial injury when measured using advanced pressure sensor technology, however, balance tests available at the bedside often appear normal within days following a concussion. Clinicians relying on these tests might miss balance deficits and misclassify concussed children as uninjured or recovered and return them to sport prematurely, exposing them to serious consequences. Normal activities of living and sport require the simultaneous coordination of thinking and vision to maintain balance control. Combined skill testing is effective at detecting balance problems, but is unfeasible as a screening tool as it relies on expensive laboratory equipment and specialized training. My project will address this problem by combining existing clinical tests of thinking, vision, and balance to develop a novel, simple, no-cost, clinical test that better identifies balance deficits in concussed adolescents than the current standard. If balance deficits can be identified sooner, clinicians can target early interventions to improve prognosis and track recovery. By including this new balance measure into future editions of national and international guidelines, this research will have wide reach and improve the health of outcomes of children by enabling safe return-to-sport decisions following concussion.