Head protection in football.

This Study was supported by Michael W Louis, The Sports Foundation, Inc. and the W W. Grainger Foundation, Inc. Attention has been drawn to knee injuries in football but these injuries can only end the careers of famous football players while head injuries can be fatal. This paper will point to the problem and include the development of the present day helmet, information needed to improve head protection, how to acquire this knowledge, the data on six hundred and fifty impacts to the head of a football player obtained by telemetry and an explanation of the discrepancies between this data and that which has been measured in the laboratory. The commonly quoted fatality statistics on head injunes in football give no indication of the true incidence of brain trauma. Although concussion refers to some degree of loss of consciousness after impact with little if any gross evidence of brain damage and likely to be temporary, it will be used in this paper to indicate any degree of brain injury that is accompanied by loss of consciousness. The injury statistics quoted by Robey (1) imply that fifty-four thousand concus-