All merchandise featured on WIRED are independently chosen by our editors. However, Mind Guard we could obtain compensation from retailers and/or from purchases of merchandise through these hyperlinks. Football’s concussion drawback has spawned an unlimited market of questionable options-unproven supplements, mouth guards claiming to protect against brain trauma, a collar marketed as "bubble wrap" for a player’s brain. If only preventing brain trauma have been that easy. Whether in an effort to save lots of the sport and players’ brains or in a cynical ploy to revenue off the concern of dad and mom and players, the marketplace for concussion applied sciences is booming. An eagerness to "do something" has led individuals to undertake or promote some fairly dubious products, says Kathleen Bachynski, an assistant professor of public health at Muhlenberg College. In a paper printed in July, she and her colleague James Smoliga documented the increasing availability of pseudoscientific concussion merchandise. The Federal Trade Commission has also been monitoring bogus claims. In 2012 it prohibited a company called Brain-Pad from claiming its mouth guard can scale back the danger of concussion.

The FTC also warned 18 other corporations about their products, together with a dietary complement endorsed by New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady and marketed by his business accomplice Alejandro Guerrero that promised to guard against concussions by providing a sort of "seat belt" for the brain booster supplement. The complement was ultimately discontinued. But new merchandise proceed to crop up, making claims that transcend the evidence. These technofixes face a difficult problem: the laws of physics. When your head will get yanked around, your Mind Guard does too, and it’s practically inconceivable to decouple the two. "You can’t put a seat belt around the mind," says Adnan Hirad, a graduate pupil at the University of Rochester who has carried out research on brain injuries in soccer players. Concussions happen when the pinnacle abruptly accelerates or decelerates, pressing 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 against the dash if the vehicle makes a sudden cease.

With enough pressure, the brain can slam the inside of the skull, but what occurs more commonly is the drive of the motion stretches the nervous tissue, impairing the flexibility of neurons to fireplace properly, says Steven Broglio, Mind Guard director of the Michigan Concussion Center in Ann Arbor. Rotation of the pinnacle seems to trigger extra brain stretching and deformation than just straight back-and-forth motions, says Mehmet Kurt, a mechanical engineer at Stevens Institute of Technology. Because there’s no good option to see what’s occurring within the mind when somebody will get dinged on the pinnacle, researchers are left to study the aftermath. "What’s puzzling about concussions is that the signs can fluctuate a lot," Kurt says. "Most of the time when a participant has a concussion, customary medical imaging methods don't present injury," he says, and that makes it inconceivable to diagnose with any one take a look at. Instead, a doctor conducts a clinical examination to evaluate the patient’s symptoms and makes a judgement call.

And the worry about head accidents isn’t nearly concussions, but about chronic traumatic encephalopathy, Mind Guard or Mind Guard CTE, a neurodegenerative illness characterized by reminiscence loss, Mind Guard cognitive issues, and mood disorders, among other issues. "It’s near settled science that CTE is caused by repetitive head blows and not by single concussions," Hirad says. The current thinking is that even sub-concussive hits can contribute, which suggests stopping concussions alone won’t eradicate the danger. Earlier this year, Hirad’s analysis group reported a stark finding. After a single season of play, collegiate soccer gamers ended up with much less midbrain white matter than they’d started with. Using accelerometers mounted to the players’ helmets, the scientists noticed that the degree of white matter loss correlated with how much rotational acceleration the players’ brains had skilled. The research reinforces the idea that rotational forces are particularly dangerous, Hirad says. The finding also underscores the boundaries of current helmet know-how.