The Impact of High-Contact Sports on Memory and Auditory Comprehension in Young Athletes following Sports-Related Concussions

Purpose: we investigated whether memory and language abilities differ by sports played (football, basketball, and ice hockey) following Sport-Related Concussions (SRCs). Methods: A total of 74 young athletes with mild TBI were enrolled in this study and all participants specifically from Sports-Related Concussions. The group of 74 participants with mTBI from SRCs was divided into three groups by the sports played: football (N=35), basketball (N=19), and ice hockey (N=20). Results: The Multivariate Analysis of Variance (MANOVA) was conducted on the two selected variables, verbal memory composite scores and CRTT-Efficiency Scores. The results of the MANOVA demonstrated that there were no significant differences across three sports group. Conclusions: The primary goal of the current study was to investigate whether measurement of cognitivelinguistic function across three different high-contact sports showed significant differences on young athletes’ memory and language performance following sport-related concussions (SRCs). The results revealed that verbal memory and auditory comprehension at a sentence level were not statistically significantly different across three main high-contact sports following SRCs.