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| Australian Football Rules player Chelsea Randall after a collision with an opposing player this year |
Dr Adrian Cohen, an emergency and trauma physician in
Australia who researches concussion prevention, says women sustain more
concussions than men in high-impact sports such as rugby league, rugby union
and Australian rules football. Women also take longer to recover.
One possibility is that women may be more likely to report concussion.
But Dr Cohen says there are complex physiological factors at play.
"There are structural differences between men and
women's brains," he says. "They actually have a slightly faster
metabolism than male brains, and they have slightly greater oxygen flow to the
head.
"The cells themselves can be thought of as being
slightly hungrier. So in the context of an injury that disrupts the supply of
glucose and oxygen, it can help explain why they suffer more damage."
He also says women are joining high impact sports without
years of tackle training and have had less opportunity to build up the strong
neck muscles crucial in protecting against impact.
Dr Rowena Mobbs, a neurologist at Australia’s Macquarie
University who researches and treats the effects of concussion in sportspeople,
says there is truth to suggestions that women experience concussion symptoms more
severely.
"But there is this really important overlap of chronic
migraine after trauma, and the term for this is post-traumatic headache,"
she says.
"When we talk about migraine ... they're the same
multitude of symptoms that can occur in concussion.
"So you can be dizzy and clouded in your thinking,
lethargic and have double vision. And we know that women are at three times the
risk of chronic migraine than men."
Read the whole piece here
For a 2019 article titled “Australian research shows female
athletes have a higher rate of concussion and a prolonged recovery time”, go
here
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