Gender may not impact high school athlete return to learn after sport-related concussion
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Key takeaways:
- Results showed gender was not associated with return to learn rates in high school athletes.
- Higher initial symptom severity score was associated with longer return to learn.
Published results showed gender may not be a significant factor in return to learn rates for high school athletes with sports-related concussions.
“Our study revealed no differences in [return to learn] RTL between boys and girls in contrast to existing literature that has suggested longer recovery times in girls compared to boys,” Douglas P. Terry, PhD, assistant professor of neurological surgery at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, told Healio.
Terry and colleagues retrospectively collected data on 895 high school athletes with sports-related concussions in a prospective concussion recovery surveillance program in Maine from February 2015 to January 2023.
The primary outcome of the study was days to return to learn, defined by the number of days that it took a student athlete to fully return to school without academic accommodations. Mann-Whitney U-tests were used to compare return to learn rates between boys and girls.
Although Terry and colleagues found a greater proportion of boys (93.5%) than girls (89.4%) returned to learn without accommodations by 3 weeks after concussion, they found no significant differences in this measure at 1 week, 2 weeks or 4 weeks.
According to the study, gender was not a significant predictor of time to return to learn in any of the multivariate models. However, longer days to evaluation, higher initial symptom severity score and greater number of previous concussions were associated with longer times to return to learn, according to the study.
In addition, higher initial symptom severity score was associated with longer times to return to learn regardless of the symptom scale used by researchers.
“The Vanderbilt Sports Concussion Center & Vanderbilt Sports Concussion Research is consistently striving to elucidate factors associated with recovery in athletes after sport-related concussion,” Terry told Healio. “Current ongoing efforts include investigation of additional factors that may affect return to learn as well as other predictors of recovery following sport-related concussion, including specific symptom presentation, sex differences and mechanisms of injury.”
He added, “As our study is one of the first dedicated investigations into return to learn and the factors that are associated with how quickly an athlete returns to the classroom after sport-related concussion, we encourage more research efforts into this evolving topic as well as standardization of RTL recommendations.”
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