All merchandise featured on WIRED are independently selected by our editors. However, we could receive compensation from retailers and/or from purchases of merchandise through these hyperlinks. Football’s concussion drawback has spawned an enormous market of questionable solutions-unproven supplements, mouth guards claiming to protect against Mind Guard reviews trauma, a collar marketed as "bubble wrap" for a player’s mind. If solely stopping brain trauma have been that easy. Whether in an effort to avoid wasting the sport and players’ brains or in a cynical ploy to profit off the worry of dad and mom and gamers, the market for concussion technologies is booming. An eagerness to "do something" has led folks to undertake or promote some pretty dubious products, says Kathleen Bachynski, an assistant professor of public well being at Muhlenberg College. In a paper printed in July, she and her colleague James Smoliga documented the rising availability of pseudoscientific concussion products. The Federal Trade Commission has also been monitoring bogus claims. In 2012 it prohibited a company known as natural brain health supplement-Pad from claiming its mouth guard can reduce the chance of concussion.

The FTC additionally warned 18 different companies about their products, including a dietary supplement endorsed by New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady and marketed by his business companion Alejandro Guerrero that promised to protect against concussions by providing a form of "seat belt" for the mind guard brain health supplement. The supplement was finally discontinued. But new products continue to crop up, making claims that transcend the evidence. These technofixes face a tough problem: the laws of physics. When your head gets yanked around, your brain health supplement does too, and it’s almost unattainable to decouple the two. "You can’t put a seat belt around the mind guard brain health supplement," says Adnan Hirad, a graduate pupil at the University of Rochester who has performed analysis on brain health supplement injuries in soccer gamers. Concussions happen when the top abruptly accelerates or decelerates, urgent the mind toward the skull-consider how an astronaut gets pushed into their seat when a rocket takes off, or how a passenger gets thrown in opposition to the sprint if the vehicle makes a sudden stop.

With enough power, the mind can slam the inside of the skull, but what happens extra generally is the force of the movement stretches the nervous tissue, impairing the flexibility of neurons to fire correctly, says Steven Broglio, director of the Michigan Concussion Center in Ann Arbor. Rotation of the pinnacle appears to cause more mind stretching and deformation than simply straight again-and-forth motions, says Mehmet Kurt, a mechanical engineer at Stevens Institute of Technology. Because there’s no good solution to see what’s happening in the brain when someone will get dinged on the head, researchers are left to study the aftermath. "What’s puzzling about concussions is that the signs can range too much," Kurt says. "Most of the time when a player has a concussion, standard medical imaging techniques don't present injury," he says, and that makes it inconceivable to diagnose with anyone take a look at. Instead, a doctor conducts a clinical examination to assess the patient’s signs and makes a judgement call.

And Mind Guard reviews the worry about head accidents isn’t nearly concussions, however about chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, a neurodegenerative disease characterized by reminiscence loss, cognitive issues, and temper disorders, amongst other things. "It’s close to settled science that CTE is brought on by repetitive head blows and never by single concussions," Hirad says. The current considering is that even sub-concussive hits can contribute, which implies preventing concussions alone won’t get rid of the danger. Earlier this year, Hirad’s research group reported a stark discovering. After a single season of play, collegiate football gamers ended up with much less midbrain white matter than they’d began with. Using accelerometers mounted to the players’ helmets, the scientists noticed that the diploma of white matter loss correlated with how much rotational acceleration the players’ brains had experienced. The examine reinforces the concept rotational forces are particularly dangerous, Hirad says. The discovering additionally underscores the bounds of present helmet expertise.