Publications

Social and cultural dynamics surrounding expectations of athletes may influence recovery after sport-related concussion. Qualitative investigations narrowly focus on reporting, or specific age groups or sports. We explore how collegiate student-athletes experience concussion recovery; manage diagnosis, symptoms, and return-to-academics and return-to-play decision-making.

We created symptom domains based on previous literature, guided by clinical expertise. To determine which symptom grouping best represent the data, we used CFA and compared a single-domain model to 3- and 6-domains. We examined fit statistics to assess relative and absolute model fit. Motivated by differences in the prevalence of some individual symptoms by sex in our study, we also examined model invariance by sex to determine if symptoms were being measured as part of the same underlying construct(s).

In this blog post, we will explain how collegiate student-athletes with concussion fit into four distinct ‘symptom profile’ groups. Our study, recently published in BJSM (1), included sport-related concussions (SRC) across five academic years 2015-2016/2019–2020 (n=1160) from the Ivy League–Big Ten Epidemiology of Concussion Study (Ivy-B1G Study) (2).

Growing interest has motivated recent studies to examine differences in recovery after sport-related concussion (SRC) by sex.