Closing the Concussion Care Gap
by Jerrad Zimmerman, MD and Aaron T. Anderson, PhD
Carle Illinois College of Medicine
Innovation Grand Rounds
Friday, November 13, 2020
noon – 1:00 p.m. Hear from Dr. Zimmerman and Dr. Anderson
1:00 – 1:30 p.m. Reflection & Dialogue
Zoom Call-in: go.illinois.edu/innovationgrandrounds
Meeting ID: 826 0827 0142 Password: 580107
Abstract:
Sports related concussion (SRC) affects over 3 million pediatric athletes in the United States every year, about 1 in 10 children will have a concussion or mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI) by the age of 10, and a significant portion are undiagnosed or unreported. SRCs and mTBIs are difficult to diagnose because the symptoms vary widely between patients, baseline assessments typically are not routine, and normative values for pediatrics are not available. At Carle Foundation Hospital, the team of Sports Medicine physicians and certified athletic trainers (ATCs) provide clinical care to 18 surrounding high school sports programs. As part of clinical management, baseline concussion assessments have been performed on every athlete in a high-risk sport for over ten years and has created the largest clinical database of normative values for pediatrics and adolescents. This database will provide much needed normative values both for Carle’s OSM and any provider assessing pediatric/adolescent SRCs without a baseline assessment. The normative values will take into account age, sex, sport, history of injury, learning disabilities, and symptoms at time of baseline. Having such a detailed normative database will improve the confidence of providers assessing head injury, thus decreasing the current gap between clinical need and care for patients.
Biography:
Jerrad Zimmerman, MD has been a practicing sports medicine physician for over 15 years at Carle Foundation Hospital in Orthopedic and Sports Medicine, with an emphasis on sports related concussion in high school and collegiate athletes. During this time, he has been a team physician for the Division of Intercollegiate Athletics (DIA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Parkland College.
Aaron T. Anderson, PhD is a Carle Foundation Hospital-Beckman Institute Postdoctoral Fellow. Dr. Anderson has research interests in clinical translational applications of MRI and epidemiology of neurological diseases. His primary focus is the development of magnetic resonance elastography (MRE) for measuring the neurological tissue properties within healthy and diseased populations, with an emphasis on traumatic brain injury and epilepsy. His epidemiology work provides the clinical context for application of MRE in clinical translational research.
