I wanted to get a better sense of the risk, so here is some arithmetic.
Putting together one of the quotes above:
An estimated 300,000 sport-related traumatic brain injuries, predominantly concussions, occur annually in the United States.
And this bit from the recommended Prognosis section:
Most TBIs are mild and do not cause permanent or long-term disability; however, all severity levels of TBI have the potential to cause significant, long-lasting disability. Permanent disability is thought to occur in 10% of mild injuries, 66% of moderate injuries, and 100% of severe injuries.
And this bit from the Epidemiology section:
a US study found that moderate and severe injuries each account for 10% of TBIs, with the rest mild.
We get that there are 300k sport-related TBI’s per year in the US, and of those, 240k are mild, 30k are moderate, and 30k are severe. Those severity levels together result in 24k + 20k + 30k ~= 75k cases of permanent disability per year.
To put that in perspective, we can compare to another common activity that has potential to cause harm:
In 2010, there were an estimated 5,419,000 crashes, 30,296 of with fatalities, killing 32,999, and injuring 2,239,000.
If we say that a fatality and a permanent disability due to brain injury are the same order of magnitude of badness, this suggests that sports and traveling by car expose the average (as in mean, not median) American to roughly the same level of risk.
Would be interesting to dig deeper to see how much time Americans spend in cars vs playing sports on average (and then you’d also want to look at the benefits you get from each), but I’ll stop here for now.
I wanted to get a better sense of the risk, so here is some arithmetic.
Putting together one of the quotes above:
And this bit from the recommended Prognosis section:
And this bit from the Epidemiology section:
We get that there are 300k sport-related TBI’s per year in the US, and of those, 240k are mild, 30k are moderate, and 30k are severe. Those severity levels together result in 24k + 20k + 30k ~= 75k cases of permanent disability per year.
To put that in perspective, we can compare to another common activity that has potential to cause harm:
If we say that a fatality and a permanent disability due to brain injury are the same order of magnitude of badness, this suggests that sports and traveling by car expose the average (as in mean, not median) American to roughly the same level of risk.
Would be interesting to dig deeper to see how much time Americans spend in cars vs playing sports on average (and then you’d also want to look at the benefits you get from each), but I’ll stop here for now.