New Metric Assesses Cumulative Effect of Head Hits in Football

Researchers at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center have developed a new method to measure the cumulative effect of hits to a football player’s head. Called the Risk Weighted Cumulative Exposure (RWE), the metric assesses the frequency and magnitude of all impacts occuring over the course of a football season, capturing the players’ concussion risk. “This metric gives us a way to look at a large number of players and the hits they’ve incurred while playing football,” senior study author Joel Stitzel, Ph.D,  said. “We know that young players are constantly experiencing low-level hits that don’t cause visible injury, but there hasn’t been a good way to measure the associated risk of concussion.” Click here to read the full story.