From Slate.com article, PinkConcussion’s Katherine Snedaker comments on Abby Wamhach’s decision to play on after a jarring blow to the head…
“It creates a memory for kids: Abby got hit in the head, but she held out (from getting checked by AT until) the final moments of the game,” said Katherine Price Snedaker, the founder of the website Pink Concussions, about head injuries in girls and women. “Ten- to 14-year-olds are storing memories. How [Wambach] acted can affect the next 10 years of those kids.”
Pink Concussions’ Mission
The mission of Pink Concussions.com is to highlight what is known about female concussions, list resources, and share women’s personal experiences with head injury. The goal is to encourage more research on the vulnerability, the causes of injury and the delay in recovery time for females of all ages.
Click here to hear Katherine talk about PinkConcussions.com with Tony Savino of AM 1490 WGCH
And beyond sport concussions, what else is known about female TBI in the civilian research done on domestic violence or accidents, or by our military on female veterans?
Pink Concussions is here to find out.
Summer 2013 Internship Interest Forms
We hope to offer 5-10 interns the chance to work with experts in the concussion field to create, conduct and publish their concussion projects from the Summer of 2013. The project can be in the fields of research, education, outreach or fund raising. We are open to your ideas and have so many people in the concussion world who are willing to help inspire students to explore female concussions.
We already have several companies who are interested in sponsoring this project. The final number of interns we have for the summer will depend on the generosity of our sponsors.
These are unpaid internships, but we plan to offer each student 10-15 hours of our time over July and August to help in any way we can with the project. Please fill out the interest forms and we will be in touch.
Click here to fill out Summer Internship Interest Form
Jim Nantz and Katherine Snedaker, Founder of Pink Concussions, meet at the NFL-GE Brain Challenge Event on March 11, 2013
The Inspiration
The idea for originated from a misquote on Super Bowl Sunday 2013, when JIm Nantz stated on a pre-game show with Roger Goodell that “women’s soccer players are 2 1/2 times more likely to suffer a concussion than college football player.” What Nantz meant to say was to compare women’s soccer to “men soccer”, not to football players. This “misquote” caused controversy as press, and soccer-football fans alike scrambled to google the correct statistics.
Katherine Snedaker, MSW, watched on Twitter as people struggled to find the source of the quote; and she realized there needed to be a central hub for information about female concussions. She knew that most of the statistics about female concussions were not easy to find as they are buried in short paragraphs in larger research studies.
For example, here is American Medical Society for Sports Medicine Position Statement: Concussion in Sport 2012, which is an excellent summary of concussions in sports but findings about women’s concussions are not found until the section, Sex, on page six of the report.
- Recent data suggest that in sports with similar rules female athletes sustain more concussions than their male counterparts.
- In addition, female athletes experience or report a higher number and severity of symptoms as well as a longer duration of recovery than male athletes in several studies.
Within three days of the Super Bowl, Katherine had collected enough content to launch Pink Concussions.com and on Twitter, @PinkConcussions, and this became the first site on the internet to focus purely on female head injuries.
See Pink Concussions on…
Other great concussion education sites
