Surprising Study Finds Student Athlete Concussions Associated With Slightly Improved Cognitive Performance

In a counterintuitive new analysis, an international group of researchers are suggesting that concussions from college sports injuries might not only be less harmful than previously thought, but that they might also slightly help cognitive performance.

As the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia explains in a press release about the research, analysis of data about more than 15,000 subjects found that those who’d suffered a sports-related concussion when they were students seemed to have better cognitive outcomes than their counterparts who didn’t.

Using the United Kingdom’s massive PROTECT study, which looks at long-term health data for people between the ages of 50 and 90, researchers at the UNSW, Harvard University, Oxford, and England’s University of Exeter found that, at least statistically, suffering a concussion seems to be associated with certain benefits — and could even be considered protective.

“Our findings suggest that there is something about playing sport[s], even though a person may experience concussion, that may be beneficial for long-term cognitive outcomes,” UNSW cognitive researcher and lead study author Matt Lennon said in the press release.

Of the study’s 15,214 participants, 39.5 percent reported having had at least one concussion, which totals to roughly 6,000 people. The researchers then broke the concussions down by those who’d attained them from sports injuries and those who’d gotten them from other accidents, such as falls, car collisions, or assaults.

As The Guardian notes in its writeup of the study, which was published in the Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery and Psychiatry, the researchers found that those who’d had concussions from playing sports when they were younger appeared to have a 4.5 percentile increase in working memory than those who’d had concussions from other kinds of accidents. Moreover, they also had an apparent 7.9 percent increase in reasoning capacity.

The researchers behind the study aren’t sure exactly where this protective benefit could have come from, but they do say that it doesn’t appear to be related to increased access to higher education.

Lennon admits in the press release that although it’s possible “those who play sports have had access to better education and more resources,” he and his colleagues “controlled for these factors in the analysis,” meaning the results suggest something stranger.

Perhaps the most important caveat of this surprising study is that its findings are based on people playing amateur sports in school rather than professional athletes, who in high-impact sports like football and boxing often suffer debilitating and deadly brain disease that’s been firmly linked to repeated head trauma. There’s also widespread concern about the effects of similar injuries on the brains of young athletes.

“This finding should not be overstated — the beneficial effects were small and in people who had two or more sports-related concussions there was no longer any benefit to concussion,” Lennon said in the press release. “Additionally, this study does not apply to concussions in professional athletes whose head injuries tend to be more frequent, debilitating and severe.”

Still, as one of the lead investigators of the PROTECT study said in the UNSW’s statement about the research, further study could warrant a sea change in the way the medical industry thinks of concussions in certain contexts.

“Concussions that occur during sport do not lead to brain health concerns whereas other concussion types do, especially when people experience multiple concussions,” Anne Corbett, Exeter professor and PROTECT investigator, said. “In fact, people who take part in sport seem to have better brain health regardless of whether they have had a concussion whilst taking part or not.”