A study published online in the journal Injury Prevention suggests that teens who have had a concussion in the past year may be 25% more likely to be doing poorly in school than teens who have not had a concussion.

A bump, blow, or jolt to the head or a strike to the body that causes the brain to move quickly back and forth can result in a concussion, a temporary brain injury. Concussion symptoms include loss of consciousness, dizziness, a glazed look in the eyes, headache, amnesia, vomiting, memory issues, and difficulty focusing.

Every year, almost two million young people in the United States get concussions, which can cause long-term changes in their physical, mental, and emotional health. However, there isn’t clear, standard advice on how to get students with concussions back to school work.

Additionally, there is a lack of data regarding how concussions may affect a teen’s academic performance.

So, a group of researchers from the University of Washington in Seattle set out to find out if there was a link between high school students’ history of concussions and how well they did in school.

They looked at information about 10,756 adolescents from the 2019 Youth Risk Behaviour Survey, which is done every six months to track health risks among students in the USA.

14.9 percent of the more than 10,000 high school students analyzed reported having a concussion due to sports or other activities within the previous 12 months.

The majority of adolescents who reported no concussions were female (50.9%), while the majority of those who reported one or more concussions were male (53.1% and 63.5%, respectively).

In comparison to kids with zero or one concussions (10.6% and 9.4%, respectively), students who self-identified as black or African American had a higher proportion of students with two or more concussions (15.6 percent).

The majority of adolescents (78.8 percent) said they were doing well in school overall.

The researchers determined that a history of at least one concussion in the previous 12 months was associated with a 25 percent increased chance of academic failure, and that this association grew greater with recurrent concussions.

The authors noted that the correlation varied by race/ethnicity, but that more research was needed to study the interaction of race/ethnicity on the association.

The authors acknowledge that their study had some limitations, including the failure to compare the change in academic standing between before and after the reported concussions, the lack of verification of the students’ self-reports of their concussions and outcomes, and the exclusion of socioeconomic factors like family income and residence location.

The authors nevertheless draw the following conclusion: “History of concussion was significantly associated with poor academic standing and experiencing multiple concussions could be particularly harmful on student outcomes.

Students with concussions may benefit from school-based injury prevention efforts, including promotion of helmet use, school screening for concussions, and adherence to return-to-play and return-to-learn guidelines, according to the study. This is especially true for the racial and ethnic groups most affected, the authors write.

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