The Concussion Issue

In recent years, many writers - most notably Alan Schwarz of the New York Times (1) and Malcolm Gladwell of the New Yorker (2) have begun remarking on the high incidence of devastating psychiatric and neurologic disease among former football players. The reasons behind this are not very difficult to figure out. Football players, over a lifetime, endure countless blows and repetitive trauma to their head and spinal cord. And, one would think, it should only be a matter of time until the human body can no longer absorb these hits without consequence.
Despite these concerns, there is very little evidence of any sort of systematic effort to truly assess the effect of football-playing on the future risk of disease. This can be done via construction of an electronic database that would monitor these players over time. This is important to do for several reasons. Firstly, we need to understand the real magnitude of this relationship so that we can decide how important it is to intervene. For example, if we find out that one out of every four players are at increased risk for future disease, then perhaps we need to cancel the football season and immediately re-evaluate the game and how to make it safer. Secondly, there are a wide variety of potential confounders involved in the relationship between football and future psychiatric/neurological disorders that need to be addressed and accounted for. For example, football players are more likely than the average person to drink alcohol or smoke cigarettes - these are both factors known to be related to an increased risk for a wide variety of neurological and psychiatric diseases. The only way to truly adjust for these relationships (in assessing the direct link between football-playing and future disease) is to construct a database so that we can engage in a formal study. Lastly, this would be useful so that we can gauge the effect of any intervention that we decide to pursue (assuming that indeed this link is real).
We must use the awesome power of information technology and storage to begin accumulating information on a wide variety of characteristics associated with every player in the NFL today as well as every retired NFL player. This idea is similar to what Sergey Brin, Co-Founder of Google, is proposing in order to better understand the risk factors associated with developing Parkinson's Disease (3). Through this we can quantitatively determine the true relationship between football-playing and future disease, as well as account for the confounders that are likely impacting this relationship.

References
1. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/27/sports/football/27concussion.html?_r=1&ref=alan_schwarz
2. http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/10/19/091019fa_fact_gladwell
3. http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/06/ff_sergeys_search/

Hello Blogsphere

We're going to be discussing the many ways in which the National Football League (NFL) can be made significantly better by the adoption of a wide variety of Information Technology (IT) - based solutions. Please read on...