The Hamilton Spectator published an article regarding the impact that hockey has on children and teens and the correlation to brain injuries. This article stated that hockey causes the most sports-related brain injuries in children/teens, accounting for nearly half of all traumatic brain injuries in Canadian children.
Interestingly this article featured insight from Dr. Michael Cusimano, a principal researcher and neurosurgeon at St. Michael's Hospital in Toronto. Dr. Cusimano spoke on both the benefits of children in sports and the downfall of lack of research, he said; "Studies up until now really haven't put a lot of focus on the reason why children and youth are getting brain injuries in sports, and if we're going to keep people in sports, which has tons of benefits to it, we need to understand why they're getting hurt. If we understand why they're getting hurt, we can develop means by which to prevent them and make the sport relatively safer."
The study this article is based on focused on 13,000 injured children in Canada between the years 1990 -2009 and the children were between the ages of 5-19. All the data collected was from the Canadian Hospitals Injury Reporting and Prevention Program (CHIRPP), which tracks visits to emergency rooms at 11 pediatric hospitals and three general hospitals across the country. Furthermore, this study demonstrated that more than 80% of the injured children were male and the average age of the injured was 13 years old. Hockey in particular accounted for 44.3% of all brain injuries, mostly occurring in children 11 years or older. The challenge with publicizing study's such as this one is that many parents feel they need to withdraw their children from contact sports. That is NOT the message intended, it is essential to ensure your children are being physically active and being on a sports team has many valuable life lessons for children. Gluckstein Personally Injury Lawyers would like to stress that participating in sports are important, as children need to stay active. However, as parents we must ensure our children are playing these sports in the safest way possible.
If your child has been injured while participating in a contact sport please contact Gluckstein Personally Injury Lawyers for information on how to work through your child's injury.
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