Concussions on a Different Level

As I've been talking about, concussions have been detrimental to football, especially to its players.  Just recently, I found an article on football that shows the damage and side affects concussion have been having on a different age group.  An age group that's not the normal 30+ and retired but the age group that consists of teenagers playing football at the high school level.  I found out that there was an extraordinarily amount of concussions happening to high school players.  I always thought of concussions as something that only happened to older people because I didn't think that young teenagers had the ability and power to place hits on other players that could cause a concussion like NFL players or even college players.  But boy was I wrong.  This article I found presents data that I found overwhelmingly unbelievable.  In 2008-2009, studies showed that there were over 400,000 concussions involved with high school athletics, most of which came from football.  That number seems extremely large to me.  I mean that's almost half of a million teenagers or students that suffered a concussion.  Not to mention, the link concussions have had with other problems like depression and dementia.  But these kids are suffering concussions at this early of an age.  Research tells us that once a person suffers from their first concussion, they are four times as likely to receive another and the number only increases from their.  Take for instance NFL quarterbacks Troy Aikman and Steve Young.  Both are hall of fame quarterbacks that had amazing careers but careers that may have ended sooner than expected because of the concussions they received playing the game.  Aikman suffered from 10 concussions during his 12 years in the NFL.  Young didn't receive as many as Aikman but he took four concussions during his last three seasons (source).  These concussions are presenting a huge problem and the fact that their happening to teenagers in high school makes the problem more critical.  The thing that's the most frightening about concussions is the difficulty in diagnosing a concussion.  Someone may hit their head really hard and suffer a concussion but have no idea that they actually had a concussion and they may suffer brain damage or impairment later in life because of it.