An injury patient is to be analyzed not only by the computer test but by general interpretation. Read on to know more.

Team@CMHF

A blow to the head isn’t the only injury that can make a football player a little slow and confused.
A sprained ankle or strained knee might also affect how athletes perform on a computer-based test of attention, memory, and reaction time generally used to manage concussions, according to new research.

The head injuries can cause dizziness, memory problems, and trouble paying attention, which usually goes away within a few weeks. But when athletes try to come back from the blow too quickly, they risk a rare but dangerous condition, called “second impact syndrome,” which happens when someone sustains a second head injury before the first is completely healed.
“If you have someone that has had a head injury, you can’t automatically assume everything you find (on the test) is head-injury related,” Hutchison told Reuters Health. “It requires a little bit of interpretation.”

Halstead said the results aren’t a huge surprise, and that the computer test is only one tool doctors use to monitor how someone’s doing after a head injury. “We can certainly manage a concussion fine without it,” he said.

The findings show the importance of “using the whole picture, rather than just a test.” But Halstead added that because the study was relatively small, further research will be needed to get the “big picture” of how non-head injuries may affect thinking skills — and what that means for the tools doctors use to manage concussions.

Ref: http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/07/25/us-heart-exercise-idUSTRE76O65J20110725