The number of child athletes taken to emergency rooms with sports-related concussions doubled over a recent 10-year-period, a new study reports, even though participation in team sports decreased slightly during the period, from 1997 to 2007.
Among youths aged 14 to 19, meanwhile, emergency room visits for concussions sustained during team sports more than tripled over the same period.
Over all, children aged 8 to 19 had more than half a million emergency room visits for concussion from 2001 through 2005, according to the study.
The paper, published in the journal Pediatrics, is one of the first studies looking at emergency department visits and concussions among younger athletes.
Researchers used data from the National Electronic Injury Surveillance System, which collects information from hospitals, to analyze emergency room visits for children aged 8 to 13, as well as for teenagers aged 14 to 19. Data about participation in sports were obtained from the National Sporting Goods Association.
About half of all the emergency department visits for concussion were sports-related, the study found, and the younger children sustained 40 percent of them, representing more than half the concussions among this age group.
