Limited Knowledge of Concussion Symptoms in College Athletes

Concussions are common in athletes and often go unreported. A likely contributor to underreporting of concussions in athletes is lack of knowledge of concussion-related symptoms. The current study assessed concussion symptom knowledge in 382 Division I athletes and 230 nonathletes. Participants were asked to identify potential symptoms following a concussion from a list of both real symptoms and distractors. Student-athletes expected significantly more total symptoms following a concussion than did nonathletes, and they correctly identified symptoms such as nausea and/or vomiting and being easily upset by loud noises more frequently than controls. However, many student-athletes failed to identify possible emotional symptoms resulting from a concussion, and approximately 70% of student-athletes endorsed the distracter item forgetting names or faces of people you know well as being a symptom of concussion. These current findings suggest that student-athletes may have an incomplete understanding of concussion-related symptoms, and future studies are needed to determine whether formal education sessions can improve knowledge for this high-risk population.