This week Dr. Sanjay Gupta has been on CNN a lot talking about his documentary this Sunday: Big Hits, Broken Dreams. It’s about the dangers of concussions, especially for high school football players. He brought up a term I’d never heard before. Sub-concussive hits.
A sub-concussive hit is when you get hit in the head and don’t get a concussion. Nobody really notices. It may not even hurt very much. One may not hurt you. A few may not hurt you. But Dr. Gupta, who, in addition to being CNN’s Chief Medical Correspondent is a practicing neurosurgeon, has been looking into the latest research on these hits that few have paid attention to. And he has found mounting evidence that when these hits add up, which they do quickly in high school football, our teenage players’ brains are at risk.