DALLAS (AP) – Texas officials are requiring that the state’s largest schools report concussions suffered by high school athletes in a move seen as the nation’s biggest effort to track brain injuries among young athletes.
The University Interscholastic League, Texas’ governing body for public high school sports, on Monday ordered the schools to submit individual concussion reports.
School staff must answer more than a dozen questions on each player that are relayed to researchers with the O’Donnell Brain Institute at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center.
The institute’s Dr. Munro Cullum says one goal is to ultimately determine what can be done to better protect athletes.
But Dawn Comstock, a professor of epidemiology with the Colorado School of Public Health, says the move tracks concussions after they occur and doesn’t prevent them.
