Argumentative Essay On Concussions

Should children under the age of eighteen be allowed to play tackle football? Many believe that children should not participate in a contact sport, others believe that they know what they're getting their children into, but fail to realize the severity. Concussions are brain injuries due to a blow to the head or a violent shaking of the body or head. Recently, there has been studies on how to opt out the dangers of football by revamping some of its rules. However, people can’t help but to go back to the original way the sport was played because that's what they grew accustomed to. According to “Practice like Pros”, an organization supporting limited full contact practices, about three percent of NFL concussions occur during practice while about
Doctors have done research and discovered that CTE, or chronic traumatic encephalopathy, is one of the major brain diseases caused from concussions. Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy is harmful because it can cause a build up of a protein called tau, which slowly kills brain cells. Brain Injury Research Institute states that, “20 percent of this country’s high school football players suffer brain injuries in any given season”(Nader, Reed). Dr. Bennet Omalu, the neuropathologists who discovered CTE, believes that children younger than eighteen should not be playing tackle football. Unlike athletes older than eighteen, “the 4 million youth and high school football players in this country are placed on teams by the adults in their lives…”(Nader, Reed). A teens brain will not be fully developed until the age of twenty-five, therefore the impact these diseases have on these children are huge because they are not yet fully developed. Although we would like to believe that we can change the sport for the better, “football is a cultural institution in America” (Nader, Reed). In consideration, many still try to spare young athletes from having to cope with football-induced brain
University of Stirling in Scotland states, “that a single sessions of heading the ball can significantly affect a player’s brain function and memory for 24 hours”(Clarey). Many experiments have been tried to prove the damage of heading a ball in soccer. For instance, a machine launched balls at players mimicking the speed of a corner kick. Twenty-three young adults headed the ball about twenty times in under ten minutes. The players were monitored using transcranial magnetic stimulation before practice, twenty-four hours later, and then forty-eight hours later. The experiment noted that, “ the normal balance of chemicals in the brain and reductions in memory test performance of forty-one percent to sixty-seven percent”(Clarey). New guidelines state that players who are ten and younger are restricted from heading in practices or games, and children from eleven to thirteen may head the ball during games, but are restricted to only twenty headbuds. However, these guidelines so far only exist in the U.S. but, there are hopes that soon these guidelines will be applied