George Matthews

Mrs.Walters

Sports Medicine

21 February 2019

Baseline Assessment for Concussion diagnosis

Purpose

The purpose of this lab is to find relationships between sports activities and the basic

neurological functions.To understand how neurological tests can be used to determine changes in

neurological activity, and how they show signs of concussion.

Background

Baseline testing is done to provide a base that we can look back on to determine the severity of

an injury. If an athlete is suspected to have a concussion they would take the same tests in order

to determine if they do or do not have a concussion. This would be determined by the number of

answers guessed wrong compared to the number of answers guessed wrong during the baseline.

The tests give a accurate way of determining if an athlete has a concussion or not. Without a

baseline test there would be nothing to compare and expect from an athlete.

Hypothesis
I believe that the people who are more prone to neurological injuries will do worse than people

who play sports with less contact.

 Analysis

1)Trial A and B test attention and visual awareness

WDT tests memory

Scat test tests reasoning and memory

Stroop Color/Word test how fast we can process information and act upon it, and our ability to

visually determine the difference between colors.

2)My partner is a Seventeen Year old Female named Karen A. She participates in Dance Flag,

she has no received and sort of neurological injury.

3)From the information we gathers it seems as though most of the sports were pretty even, but

football actually come out with the fastest times in some cases. But for most contact sports there

was a slight difference in times.

4)Soccer players neurologically blew football players out of the water. In almost every chart

Soccer players had the best average time.

5) Across the board just by looking at the chart girls times and scores were significantly better

than boys.

Conclusion

Neurological testing is a extremely efficient and effective way to test athletes for concussions

and prevent them from getting worse. The tests can also help us understand how a concussion

can affect function and reasoning. Yes I believe we should baseline test every athlete because

concussions are super common and without a baseline the athlete could be neglected because

there is nothing to compare themselves to, there would be no way to tell if they have a

concussion.