Medical validation:
September 14, 2022
According to a recent study, teenagers who have suffered a concussion during a school year are at risk of seeing their grades plummet.
Head injuries are common in children and are the cause of a large number of emergency room visits. The problem ? After such a shock, physical, cognitive and emotional changes can appear and have a lasting impact on the daily life – especially at school – of the child. This is at least what emerges from a new study, published in the journal Injury Prevention.
School failure: trauma would increase the risk by 25%
To reach this conclusion, researchers at the University of Washington in Seattle pulled data from the national YRBS (2019), covering nearly 10,756 teenagers.
14.9% of them suffered – at least – from a concussion linked to sport and/or various activities during the last 12 months.
Most of those who reported no concussions were girls (50.9%), while most youth who reported one or more concussions were boys (53.1% and 63.5 % respectively). Overall, a large proportion of adolescents (78.8%) had a good academic level.
A particular statistical model – Poisson regression – was used to examine the association between concussion history and grade level.
Results ? Scientists have discovered that having suffered at least one head trauma in the past year increases the risk of poor school performance by 25%.
Watch out for repeated concussions
Another interesting fact: the more the teenagers suffered from concussions, the more the grade level fell.
“History of concussion was significantly associated with poor academic performance and having multiple concussions may be particularly harmful to student achievement”say the researchers.
Nevertheless, the study has some limitations – such as unverified student self-reporting. Further work is therefore needed on the subject.
In the meantime, the research team recommends increasing screening for concussions in schools and requiring students to wear helmets.