High school football players wearing a state-of-the-art helmet were 31 percent less likely to suffer a concussion during a game, a manufacturer-funded study has found.
An abstract of “Examining Concussion Rates and Return to Play in High School in Football Players Wearing Newer Helmet Technology: A Three-Year Prospective Study” is available from Neurosurgery.
In a three-year effort that evaluated 2,000 high school players, a team from the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center found that 5.4 percent of players wearing a helmet first introduced in 2002 incurred a concussion during a game. That compares with 7.6 percent of athletes wearing helmets designed before the 2002 model.
The peer-reviewed study, which was financed by Riddell, the manu-facturer of the new helmet, was published in the February 2006 edition of the journal Neurosurgery.
