High School Football Deaths

[dudog84]

Found this interesting/surprising/shocking.

Short paragraph in this morning's paper about a kid in Kansas, it states that there have been 11 reported deaths in high school football since July.

I'm a casual football fan (no high school interest; mostly Duke, some Penn State/Michigan; my Steelers are dead to me since they signed Vick)...does this happen every year? Seems to me there are very few deaths in college/pros (current players), so is this a function of kids who shouldn't be playing (too small, undiagnosed physical condition)?

Will football go the way of boxing? I think boxing was right up there with baseball 100 years ago. Though MMA seems popular, but I think it's even more brutal than boxing.

Anyway, main question (I started to ramble)...does this happen every year in high school football?

[BLPOG]

Found this interesting/surprising/shocking.

Short paragraph in this morning's paper about a kid in Kansas, it states that there have been 11 reported deaths in high school football since July.

I'm a casual football fan (no high school interest; mostly Duke, some Penn State/Michigan; my Steelers are dead to me since they signed Vick)...does this happen every year? Seems to me there are very few deaths in college/pros (current players), so is this a function of kids who shouldn't be playing (too small, undiagnosed physical condition)?

Will football go the way of boxing? I think boxing was right up there with baseball 100 years ago. Though MMA seems popular, but I think it's even more brutal than boxing.

Anyway, main question (I started to ramble)...does this happen every year in high school football?

Yes, it happens every year. I don't know the exact numbers but a dozen annually is about the number. I believe the most common cause is heat stroke, followed by head injury, although all of this information is from memory.

Edit: Journal article mostly corroborates my recollection: http://ajs.sagepub.com/content/41/5/1108.abstract Heart problems are also one of the major causes.

[-jk]

Here's an interesting study of football fatalities (http://ajs.sagepub.com/content/41/5/1108.abstract) from 1990 to 2010.


Conclusion: High school and college football have approximately 12 fatalities annually with indirect systemic causes being twice as common as direct blunt trauma. The most common causes are cardiac failure, brain injury, and heat illness. The incidence of fatalities is much higher at the college level for most injuries other than brain injuries, which were only slightly more common at the college level. The risk of SCT, heat-related, and cardiac deaths increased during the second decade of the study, indicating these conditions require a greater emphasis on diagnosis, treatment, and prevention.

There are many, many more high school football players overall...

(edit: Whoops - same source)

-jk

[devildeac]

I don't keep track of the stats but I'd guess 10-15 is a reasonable estimate. In addition to the causes of death as mentioned above, I'd expect 1-2 deaths/year from an abnormal cardiac rhythm/abnormal ECG and the same number from a previously undetected cardiomyopathy (any disorder of cardiac muscle). Add in another 1-3 from commotio cordis (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commotio_cordis), too. I imagine there might be a death due to a subarachnoid hemorrhage from a ruptured intracranial aneurysm. Paging davekay1971 to see if I missed any other possibilities.

[dudog84]

Thanks for the info. I never imagined it was this many every year. BTW, the Kansas kid was from a hit.

I was thinking why would anyone put themselves at that risk, but I (faintly) remember being a teenager. At the end of 8th grade I was going to go out for the next year's football team. I seem to remember the football players getting an inordinate amount of attention from the girls. They got to wear their football jerseys to school on Fridays. So I go into the team weight room, and I'll never forget them showing me the neck machine. That was that. I joined the swim team.

Stayed in the weight room though. Within 2 years I was the pull-up champ of the school. So I had that going for me. :D

[Tom B.]

A timely article (http://www.thenation.com/article/why-does-anybody-play-football-anymore/) on this subject.


 In a game between the Seattle Seahawks and the Dallas Cowboys, Seahawks receiver Ricardo Lockette—on a clean hit—was concussed, sustaining ligament damage in his neck, and will be out for the rest of the year. For his family, teammates, and the television audience, this diagnosis spurred waves of relief. This is because after he hit the turf, Lockette remained motionless as players from both sides held hands and prayed while the Dallas crowd was near silent. It was unnerving, and it spoke to the kind of existential fear in the pit of the stomach of every player and league-office bean counter: that someone could die directly from an on-field collision.

It's morbid to contemplate—and it's only happened once in an NFL game, over 40 years ago—but if that fear seems overly alarmist, then you haven't been paying attention to what's been happening at the high-school level over the past two months. This fall, seven high school football players have died from on-field injuries since the start of the season. The latest was Andre Smith from Bogan High School in Chicago. His official cause of death on the Cook County autopsy was "blunt force head injuries due to a football accident."

[DDoc74]

I don't keep track of the stats but I'd guess 10-15 is a reasonable estimate. In addition to the causes of death as mentioned above, I'd expect 1-2 deaths/year from an abnormal cardiac rhythm/abnormal ECG and the same number from a previously undetected cardiomyopathy (any disorder of cardiac muscle). Add in another 1-3 from commotio cordis (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commotio_cordis), too. I imagine there might be a death due to a subarachnoid hemorrhage from a ruptured intracranial aneurysm. Paging davekay1971 to see if I missed any other possibilities.

There are an estimated 1/200,000 deaths among scholastic athletes per year from sudden cardiac death.
The most common cause is a genetic abnormality of heart muscle ( hypertrophic cardiomyopathy). The second most common cause in this group are congenital abnormalities of the coronary arteries. After that in smaller numbers (and no specific order of frequency here) are abnormalities in electrical behavior of the heart such as long QT syndrome (and other abnormalities of cardiac rhythm), dilated cardiomyopathies, connective tissue disease (ie Marfan syndrome among others), trauma to the heart (commotion cordis). And others. These numbers do not address and are in addition to major traumatic injury (bus crash on

[dudog84]

Uh oh...Congress gets involved. It's called the High School Football Safety Study Act. Bi-partisan sponsorship, it might actually get somewhere.

http://usatodayhss.com/2015/congressmen-introduce-high-school-football-safety-study-act

[sagegrouse]

A timely article (http://www.thenation.com/article/why-does-anybody-play-football-anymore/) on this subject.

Here's the story from USA Today a few years ago. This guy, Stone Johnson, was a well-known sprinter. IIRC, he and Duke med student Dave Sime tied for third in the Olympic trials. Both went to camp and Dave Sime, who got the silver in Rome (losing to the German who always started early), got the nod. Stone Johnson competed in the 200 meter, where he finished fifth. Stone and Dave were on the "winning" 400-meter relay race that was DQed for passing the baton out of the lane.



Stone Johnson, an aspiring Kansas City Chiefs rookie in 1963, suffered a broken neck blocking on a kick return in an American Football League exhibition game played on Saturday, Aug. 31, in Wichita, Kan. Partially paralyzed, Johnson, a 23-year-old from Grambling State who'd run in the 1960 Summer Olympics, died on Sunday, Sept. 8.

The only other NFL-AFL death that has been attributed directly to a hit on the field also occurred in the fledgling AFL. New York Titans rookie offensive guard Howard Glenn, 24, died hours after a game in October 1960 in Houston, the cause of death also cited as a broken neck.

"What happened to Stone was tremendously tragic," said the Chiefs' quarterback then, Len Dawson, a member of the Pro Football Hall of Fame. "He was just getting started."

Johnson, 6-1 and 180 pounds, was blocking on a kickoff return midway through the first quarter, dove into an opposing Houston Oilers lineman and lay motionless on the field. It was determined Johnson had fractured his fifth cervical vertebrae, and he underwent surgery.