‘It’s not just rugby that’s the problem’: Consultant says concussion occurs in all sports

Concussions happen in all sports, not just rugby, the head of medical for Munster rugby has said.

“We see them from GAA and soccer. It’s not just rugby that’s the problem. I’d a cyclist in recently who had a concussion from coming off their bike,” Dr Jamie Kearns, a consultant in Sports and Exercise Medicine in UPMC Surgery Clinic Santry and TUS Moylish in Limerick, said.

Dr Kearns, who is also head of medical for Munster rugby, was speaking at a conference for general practitioners in Co Galway on Saturday which heard from experts on ethical issues for GPs, how to manage anxiety and advice on handling sports and exercise medicine.

Dr Kearns said there is an assumption that it’s “mostly elite athletes” arriving to clinics with sports injuries, but that was “probably less than 5 per cent of it”.

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“A lot of it is people doing sport or just trying to keep fit. We see kids, teenagers, I’d an 85-year-old in the other week with a sore ankle after being to the gym,” he said.

The most common issues were knee pain and hips and shoulders pain.

But the main challenge is the number of people with injuries “who just aren’t exercising as consistently as they want”.

“They’ll want to run marathons or half marathons but their time because of work and family commitments isn’t there, so they try to pack everything in together. They do too much too quickly rather than it being going to a gym and hurting themselves,” he says.

“That’s overstated, I don’t see many people hurting themselves from just exercising. They’re just trying to get to that big run quicker than they should,” Kearns said.

With greater access to MRIs and other scans now, a lot of what Kearns’ profession is “talking to patients about how the changes in their scans are normal age-related changes and they don’t always mean you’ve got a problem or symptoms of something”.

“People get very fearful around their scans. Half of it is often irrelevant because it’s just natural changes. But we can use the scans to figure out what’s wrong if they’re coming in with other pains,” he says, adding: “Demystifying that is a big part of what we do”.

Professor Brendan Kelly, whose speciality is in psychiatry, said he was speaking to the conference about the rise in anxiety problems post pandemic.

“The pandemic brought an interesting mix of coping and resilience on the one hand, and then anxiety and social difficulties on the other hand,” he told The Irish Times.

“It turns out that resilience and life experience were very protective for older adults. The data shows that younger people between 18-27 suffered or described more psychological symptoms than older adults. About 75 per cent of young adults said that during and immediately after the pandemic they had more anxiety or depressive symptoms than they could cope with,” he says.

The return or partial return to work has also caused “a certain amount of concern and anxiety”.

But in terms of presentation to mental health services, the biggest increase has been among children followed by young adults.

“It’s the disturbance to children’s routines that seems to have had one of the biggest effects from the pandemic. And for young adults, this is not a snowflake phenomenon. It’s simply the fact younger adults at the time of the pandemic hadn’t had the same amount of life experience,” Kelly says.

Older adults had “been through more in life by definition”.

Disruption to socialisation was part of the explanation for the difference in ages experiencing problems with their anxiety levels.

“The teens and 20s are a time in life when we’re doing important tasks organising careers and learning how to form relationships, setting ourselves up in accommodation,” Kelly says.

“It’s a particularly busy formative time. The disruption in those tasks was significant. That’s why the stress and anxiety were more common”.

Kelly also spoke about mobile phones and “our tendency to project all our problems on them”.

“We can blame them for many things like ability to concentrate or anxiety. They’re part of the picture but we do over-attribute blame to them. They’re a really convenient scapegoat for aspects of human nature that have always been present,” he said.

If people want to “demonstrate real mastery over our phones”, they should switch them off and leave them in the car overnight, he told the conference.

“We want to be near it even when it’s off. We get anxious without it. We’ve developed this physical attachment to the object quite apart from what it does,” he said.

“The tip is to try to sever that connection by keeping it physically further away from you to prove to yourself you have control over it”.