(Popular Science) – Kids’ brains are precious, in more ways than one, but until recently there wasn’t much guidance on how to best treat young people with concussions.
Now, for the first time, the Centers for Disease Control have released specific guidelines for health care workers treating young people with mild traumatic brain injuries (the medical term for a concussion). The recommendations are the result of an exhaustive review of the current research—which wasn’t always substantial—by a panel of experts to determine what the evidence says should be best practice.
It’s only recently that we’ve started to have enough research to do this. For a long time, we didn’t know a whole lot about brain trauma in general. And we still kind of don’t. Chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, definitely seems related to repeated concussions, but we don’t know how many or how severe those concussions need to be to induce long-term damage. CONTINUE