Ireland

Finger prick blood test could identify concussion in sport

Trinity College Dublin is collaborating with Leinster Rugby on research projects to find ways of identifying potential cases of concussion and helping to predict when players should be removed from play, or allowed to return to the pitch
Trinity College Dublin is collaborating with Leinster Rugby on research projects to find ways of identifying potential cases of concussion and helping to predict when players should be removed from play, or allowed to return to the pitch Trinity College Dublin is collaborating with Leinster Rugby on research projects to find ways of identifying potential cases of concussion and helping to predict when players should be removed from play, or allowed to return to the pitch (Dell)

UNIVERSITY researchers have partnered with Irish rugby players to develop ways of identifying concussion injuries in sport including a simple finger prick blood test.

Trinity College Dublin is spear-heading research into concussion, which is a mild traumatic brain injury that has been linked to early-onset dementia and depression.

Academics are collaborating with Leinster Rugby on two research projects to find ways of identifying potential cases of concussion and helping to predict when players should be removed from play, or allowed to return to the pitch.

One of the projects is focussing on developing a blood test which has seen Leinster Rugby physiotherapists, Brendan O'Connell and Karl Denvir, taking samples from participating players.

Blood samples are sent for analysis to the Steno Diabetes Center in Denmark to identify proteins that act as markers for brain injury. If a player has a suspected concussion, neurological examinations, neurophysiological and cognitive tests are also performed.

Dr Fiona Wilson, Assistant Professor in Physiotherapy at TCD, said significant progress has been made in identifying a blood test that will add to tests already available to experts.

“Concussion is one of the most complex injuries that any sports medicine team will need to manage. We ultimately require a reliable and comprehensive battery of tests that will help clinicians decide when to remove a player from the field and then when it is safe to return to sport. Our initial findings indicate that we have made significant progress in identifying a blood test that will add to the armoury of tests for sports medicine clinicians managing concussion. 

“Furthermore, collaboration with a world leading diabetes centre means that progress can be made towards development of a simple finger prick blood test which is already so familiar in diabetes management. This has great potential for simplifying the management of concussion,” Dr Wilson added.

The university’s second project combines pedestrian crash research with new findings on sports collisions.

The team uses multi angle video footage of a player collision and a system called Model Based Image Matching to map skeleton models of the player to the video footage to create an accurate reconstruction of a player's movement patterns in a specific collision.

Patterns are then analysed to allow the team to begin estimating if players are likely to have been injured or not and in what way or to what extent

The project is being led by Associate Professor Ciaran Simms from the Trinity Centre for Bioengineering with PhD student Gregory Tierney and physiotherapists from Leinster Rugby and the IRFU as well as sports scientists from the Oslo Trauma Centre.

Prof Simms said the method was first developed to assess knee and ankle joint injuries, but has “high potential to provide new insights into head injury mechanisms in contact sport”.

“If you can understand a player's movement patterns clearly in a specific collision incident, you have a very good starting point for developing counter measures, for example by taking a player off the pitch if the movement patterns suggest certain injuries or concussion is likely.

“In addition, different playing strategies could be developed to avoid getting into particular movement patterns which are more likely to cause concussion type injuries. Future phases of our research would look to speed up this kind of analysis to allow it to be used in real time. This would have the potential to provide feedback to a referee in a TMO sense to say that a particular collision was problematic, and that the player may need to come off the pitch for further assessment,” Prof Simms said.

Speaking on behalf of Leinster Rugby, Physiotherapist Brendan O'Connell who is also a Trinity PhD student said: “Concussion is obviously front and centre at the moment in rugby and in sport in general, and rightly so. The IRFU in particular have been doing great work from the ground up educating and informing everyone involved in the game of rugby.

“With that in mind, we at Leinster Rugby were very keen to explore different avenues for us to contribute to the debate in a positive manner and to hopefully make a difference."