Those within the Big Ten Conference and Ivy League are pooling their significant research and athletic resources in an effort to better understand head injuries. The two conferences ? which represent 20 institutions that are home to nearly 18,000 student-athletes ? announced last week a collaborative effort that?s designed to produce a broad set of data for researchers, athletic trainers and team doctors on the incidence and health impacts of concussions and other head trauma.
Dennis Helwig, UW-Madison?s assistant athletic director for sports medicine, notes that getting the various institutions to agree to a single protocol for the project will be the key to the initiative. ?If you can do that, instead of 20-some institutions gathering different data on concussions, you can now have all of them collecting the same information in the same way,? says Helwig, who has worked at UW-Madison since 1975.