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Annotated Bibliography

Do concussions truly lead to future health issues?

Bobby Babson II
Professor Malcolm Campbell
UWRT 1103
17 March 2016

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Annotated Bibliography
Breslow, Jason M. "High School Football Players Face Bigger Concussion Risk." PBS.
FRONTLINE, 31 Oct. 2013. Web. 09 Mar. 2016.
This developed web article published by Frontline on PBS emphasizes the risk that high
school football players face that other athletes may not, and how this can affect future
health conditions. In the article, the author states that concussions occur more often in
high school football players than at any other level. He also expresses that concussions
lead to further negative effects towards the body. Although he says nothing is proven
about whether or not concussions lead to Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy(CTE),
Breslow refers to studies done on adults who have CTE and how many of them had
suffered a concussion while playing football back in their teenage years. Another study
referenced, is one conducted by The Institute of Medicine that proved that studentathletes in high school are at a higher risk to suffer a concussion based on statistics of
concussion rates on ten thousand games and practices. From the article you cannot tell if
Breslow has any personal connection to the topic but he does reference multiple studies
so I would say this is a pretty reliable source. Even though it isnt an academic article, it
comes from an organization with a positive track record like PBS which is helpful in
determining its reliability. I believe Breslow is attempting to reach parents of high school
aged athletes to try to tell them to take caution when allowing their kids to play contact
sports and to know the risks theyre taking. I feel like this source will be extremely
helpful in my argument for concussions leading to future health risks considering
Breslow brings up some good studies regarding this topic. From these studies I have
realized that concussions may actually lead to CTE and other conditions. Because of this

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topic possibly being able to help me form an argument, it will definitely appear in my
project.

Edwards, Jonathan C, and Jeffrey D. Bodle. "Causes and Consequences of Sports Concussion."
The Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics. 42.2 (2014): 128-132. Print.
This scholarly article reports the cause and consequences of suffering concussions while
playing collision sports. Some of the causes of concussions that Edwards and Bodle talk
about are hits to head directly and whiplashing of the head. They define a concussion as,
when the brain moves out of its normal place in the skull and hits the inside walls of the
skull or even just rotates enough in the brain to cause bruising and swelling of the brain.
Edwards and Bodle also talk about how there are three types of consequences: short-term,
medium-term, and long-term. Short-term consists of headaches and dizziness; mediumterm is having a hard time sleeping and having a hard time concentration; long-term
would include conditions such as CTE. Just from reading this article, I cannot tell if
Edwards or Bodle have a personal connection to this topic so I wouldnt think it is bias.
That doesnt matter though since this article is peer-reviewed, meaning it is a reliable
source. Towards the end it talks about autopsies done on formal NFL and NHL players
and what their brain is like. Most of the brains showed evidence of CTE present so this
article would help me in forming an argument that concussions in sports lead to further
negative health conditions. I would recommend this article to someone looking for
reliable information source about the causes and consequences of concussions in sports.
Fainaru, Steve. "NFL Acknowledges, for First Time, Link between Football, Brain Disease."
ESPN. ESPN Internet Ventures, 15 Mar. 2016. Web. 15 Mar. 2016.

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This source is an article posted on a popular website. In the article, Fainaru talks about
how links have been made between concussions in the football and CTE. Unfortunately,
this disease can only be diagnosed after the patient has died and an autopsy has been
completed. A study done by Dr. Ann Mckee of Boston University, showed that ninety out
of ninety-four former NFL athletes who have passed away, have the CTE disease found
in their brain. In the passage, although irrelevant to my topic, Fainaru discusses court
cases where diseased NFL players families have sued the NFL for not telling athletes,
prior to entering the league, that concussions and taking continuous hits may lead to
negative health conditions down the road. Steve Fainaru is just an ESPN senior writer so
there is no connection between himself and this topic that would make him be biased in
the article. Even though this article stays only on one side of the argument it provides a
lot of evidence that concussions have more future effects than we all thought at one point.
Because of the studies conducted by doctors at major universities that were brought up in
the article, I would consider these points reliable. In my argument I only want to use
reliable sources that can back my information and since this article appeases both of those
pre-requisites I want, I will most definitely use this source and its information on my final
project.
Loyola University Health System. "Do sports concussions really cause chronic traumatic
encephalopathy?." ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 2 December 2013. 09 March 2016
This reliable website posted an article on whether or not concussions truly lead to further
negative health conditions. In the article the author states that there is clearly not enough
evidence to prove that concussions lead to future health conditions like CTE. The author
refers to multiple studies conducted by Loyola University Medical Center and New York

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University School of Medicine to prove that, just because you have suffered a concussion
doesnt mean you will suffer from further conditions. The two doctors, from Loyola and
NYU who wrote an article that states that studies which focused on concussions and CTE
were not conducted on random samples. Because of this, the data found during the study
would be skewed to think that concussions lead to negative health conditions. There is no
connection to be seen between the author and the subject so I cannot say that this article
is bias; all I can see is that the author used multiple studies conducted from reliable
sources to back their reasoning. This article is also published on sciencedaily.com which
is a very reliable source to find information of these sorts of topics. From this article, I
believe the author is trying to reach out to people who think that concussions are reasons
to hold out from playing sports where suffering from a concussion is a risk. Because of
the reliability of this source and its studies referenced, I will definitely use this article as a
source of information in my project as it could help me in making my counter argument
against the negative effects of concussions.

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