Long-Term Cognitive Impairments of Sports Concussions in College-Aged Athletes: A Meta-Analysis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACT Introduction/Purpose This meta-analysis aimed to investigate the long-term (3+ months) consequences of concussion across cognitive domains (processing speed, memory, attention, and executive functions) and subdomains in young adult athletes (university, professional, or recreational). Methods Six databases (EMBASE, PubMed, PsycINFO, SPORTDiscus, Web of Science, and Cochrane List of Registered Trials) were searched for studies that compared cognitive performance between athletes with a history of concussion (HOC) and control athletes who never sustained a brain injury. Thus, the analyses were restricted to the studies investigating sports concussions. Results Nineteen studies, including 20 independent experiments with 1514 participants (521 HOC athletes, 1184 controls), were identified. Athletes from the HOC group sustained an average of 2.40 ± 0.99 concussions, with an average of 29.88 ± 19.26 months after injury. Importantly, all HOC athletes were tested at least 3 months after their most recent concussion. The results indicated significant medium-to-large group differences (Hedges’ g = 0.55–1.03; P values < 0.0001) for executive functions subdomains on both standardized clinical tests and screening tools. Specifically, HOC athletes had lower cognitive performance relative to controls in strategy generation/regulation, verbal set-shifting and interference management on standardized clinical tests (Regensburger verbal fluency S words and G/R words), and response inhibition (ImPACT Impulse Control composite) and prospective working memory (Cogstate two-back task) on screening tools. Encoding phase of visual memory (Brief Visuospatial Memory Test) on standardized clinical tests approached significance (Hedges’ g = 0.40; P values = 0.08). Conclusions The current findings provide a preliminary guideline to clinicians for the assessment of cognition in HOC athletes and inform future guidelines on common data elements of sport-related concussions.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".