All merchandise featured on WIRED are independently selected by our editors. However, we may obtain compensation from retailers and/or from purchases of merchandise through these links. Football’s concussion downside has spawned a vast market of questionable options-unproven supplements, mouth guards claiming to guard towards mind trauma, a collar marketed as "bubble wrap" for a player’s mind. If only stopping brain health supplement trauma were that straightforward. Whether in an effort to avoid wasting the sport and players’ brains or in a cynical ploy to profit off the concern of dad and mom and gamers, the marketplace for concussion applied sciences is booming. An eagerness to "do something" has led individuals to undertake or promote some fairly dubious products, says Kathleen Bachynski, an assistant professor of public health at Muhlenberg College. In a paper published in July, she and her colleague James Smoliga documented the increasing availability of pseudoscientific concussion merchandise. The Federal Trade Commission has also been monitoring bogus claims. In 2012 it prohibited an organization called Brain-Pad from claiming its mouth guard can cut back the risk of concussion.

The FTC also warned 18 other firms about their merchandise, together with a dietary supplement endorsed by New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady and marketed by his enterprise partner Alejandro Guerrero that promised to guard against concussions by offering a sort of "seat belt" for the brain. The complement was eventually discontinued. But new merchandise proceed to crop up, making claims that transcend the evidence. These technofixes face a troublesome problem: the laws of physics. When your head gets yanked around, your mind does too, and it’s practically inconceivable to decouple the two. "You can’t put a seat belt around the mind," says Adnan Hirad, a graduate scholar at the University of Rochester who has achieved research on Mind Guard official site injuries in football players. Concussions happen when the top abruptly accelerates or decelerates, urgent the mind toward the skull-consider how an astronaut will get pushed into their seat when a rocket takes off, or how a passenger gets thrown towards the dash if the vehicle makes a sudden cease.

With enough power, the brain can slam the inside of the skull, but what happens more generally is the force of the movement stretches the nervous tissue, impairing the ability of neurons to fireplace properly, says Steven Broglio, director of the Michigan Concussion Center in Ann Arbor. Rotation of the pinnacle seems to cause more brain stretching and deformation than simply straight again-and-forth motions, says Mehmet Kurt, a mechanical engineer at Stevens Institute of Technology. Because there’s no good method to see what’s occurring within the mind when someone will get dinged on the pinnacle, researchers are left to examine the aftermath. "What’s puzzling about concussions is that the signs can vary lots," Kurt says. "Most of the time when a participant has a concussion, customary medical imaging strategies don't show damage," he says, and that makes it unimaginable to diagnose with anybody take a look at. Instead, a physician conducts a clinical examination to assess the patient’s signs and makes a judgement name.

And the worry about head injuries isn’t just about concussions, but about chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, a neurodegenerative disease characterized by memory loss, cognitive issues, and mood disorders, amongst different issues. "It’s close to settled science that CTE is brought on by repetitive head blows and not by single concussions," Hirad says. The present considering is that even sub-concussive hits can contribute, which suggests preventing concussions alone won’t get rid of the risk. Earlier this yr, Hirad’s analysis group reported a stark discovering. After a single season of play, collegiate football gamers ended up with much less midbrain white matter than they’d started with. Using accelerometers mounted to the players’ helmets, Mind Guard official site the scientists noticed that the degree of white matter loss correlated with how much rotational acceleration the players’ brains had experienced. The research reinforces the concept rotational forces are especially risky, Mind Guard official site Hirad says. The finding additionally underscores the bounds of current helmet know-how.