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• Posted October 18, 2024

Sports Concussion Outcomes Can Be Made Worse By Depression

Depression can make it tougher for athletes to recover from a concussion, and vice versa, a new study finds.

Student athletes who have both concussion and depression have significantly worse symptoms for both conditions, researchers reported recently in the journal Brain Research.

What's more, electrical signals in the brain are more disrupted among people with both concussion and depression than among those with only one of these conditions, the researchers noted.

“We wanted to measure -- both subjectively and objectively -- whether these two neurological conditions also have a compounding effect on each other, and our study demonstrated that they do,” said lead researcher Owen Griffith, a doctoral candidate in kinesiology with Penn State.

For the study, researchers studied 10 male and 25 female college athletes. All received EEG brain scans and underwent screenings for concussion and depression symptoms.

Those who had both depression and concussion reported nearly twice as many symptoms of depression as those who had either condition alone, results showed.

Likewise, those with both depression and concussion reported significantly worse and more prolonged post-concussion symptoms than those who suffered a concussion but no depression.

The EEG brain scans showed that people had less coherent brain wave patterns if they suffered both concussion and depression, researchers said.

These EEG measurements show that functional connectivity between brain areas is significantly disrupted in people with a sports-related concussion and a history of depression, compared to those with either or neither condition, researchers said.

People with either depression or concussion showed some disruption in neural connectivity, but nothing compared to those with both conditions.

“To our knowledge, this is the first time anyone has used EEG to study the co-occurrence of concussion and depression in this manner,” Griffith said in a Penn State news release. “This study presented only a partial picture of the scope of brain connectivity disruption, but these results are striking enough that they should inspire practitioners to consider this in their management of patients.”

Sports doctors and athletic trainers might need to adjust their treatment of athletes with both concussion and depression, researchers said.

For example, if someone who has depression suffers a concussion, their timeline for returning to play might need to be longer.

“We regularly see people who are struggling to recover from concussion and other people who recover quickly,” said senior researcher Semyon Slobounov, a professor of kinesiology with Penn State. “Historically, the clinical standard was to approach concussion as a problem with a one-size-fits-all solution."

“This study demonstrated that people with pre-existing mental health conditions may require more care in recovery from a concussion so that we can keep our athletes -- and members of the general population -- healthy throughout their lives,” Slobounov said.

More information

The Mayo Clinic has more on post-concussion symptoms.

SOURCE: Penn State, news release, Oct. 18, 2024