In week three of the NFL season, Miami Dolphins quarterback, Tua Tagovailoa, left the game against the Buffalo Bills after taking a hard hit and seeming disoriented.

Tagovailoa re-entered the game after the staff ruled it a back injury.

The next week against the Cincinnati Bengals, Tagovailoa suffered another hard hit which led to his limbs freezing up.

He was taken to the hospital after being taken off the field on a stretcher. When he was released from the hospital he was put on concussion protocol. He has not played a snap in a game since.

The Dolphins coaching and medical staff received a lot of criticism for allowing him to play against the Bengals after he showed disorientation the week before.

At Indiana University, there have been discussions about concussions since they started the world’s largest study on them in 2016.

The study came to an end in 2020, due to the pandemic, but through the almost four years it was underway, there was a massive amount of data collected.

Nicholas Port, an associate professor at the IU School of Optometry, got to be a part of this study that tested over 30,000 student-athletes and military cadets from 30 different universities and military academies.

When asked about long-term effects of concussions, Port says they have to wait for subjects to get older to know the full effect. That’s why they will continue to follow these student-athletes and military cadets over the next 20 years.

IU PhD student Devin Rettke is one of many students participating in research more based around adolescents.

This research is focused on repetitive sub-concussive head impacts; impacts that don’t trigger the normal signs and symptoms of concussions.

The research team will measure every impact players experience in games. They will also assess players’ potential eyeball and eyelid movement impairment, information processing and blood biomarkers.

They’ll be tracking this through computerized mouth guards, neurological imaging and blood samples.

Rettke says detrimental head injuries, and especially repetitive sub-concussive head impacts, are especially hard on developing brains.

They can cause impairment during key developmental years, when young people are going through puberty and falling in love for the first time.

We may not know the long-term effects of concussions yet, but we can see through instances like Tagovailoa’s, they can be damaging.