FREQUENCY OF HEAD INJURIES IN FOOTBALL WORRIES EXPERTS : CONCUSSIONS MAY LEAD NFL TO CHANGE HELMET DESIGN.

Byline: Angelo Bruscas Seattle Post-Intelligencer 

Steve Young has had six concussions since he started playing pro football in 1984, including two this year.

Chris Miller was forced into early retirement last year after taking repeated blows to the head.

Former New York Jets receiver Al Toon estimates he suffered at least 12 concussions before he left the National Football League in 1991. San Francisco linebacker Gary Plummer figures he has had more than 200.

Troy Aikman, Warren Moon and most recently, Jeff Hostetler, Stan Humphries and Jim Everett, are some of the NFL's prominent athletes who have sustained concussions and continue to play the game.

Others outside the NFL limelight haven't been so fortunate.

In October 1995, 14-year-old David Bosse of Kirkland, Wash., died after suffering a severe head injury while making a tackle for Rose Hill Junior High.

Two months ago, 18-year-old Eric Michael Hoggatt of Reseda High School died several hours after suffering a massive brain hemorrhage that likely came from a blow to the head during a Sept. 12 football game.

Concussions in football, from the pros to Pop Warner leagues, not occur frequently but they can be life-threatening, according to doctors and experts who are becoming more vocal with every well-publicized head injury. Football produces an estimated 100,000 concussions a year.

``The whole subject of concussions has been taken way too lightly,'' says sports agent Leigh Steinberg, who represents Young, Aikman, Moon and Plummer among other NFL clients. ``When Monday Night Football opens with two helmets crashing together and when videos of hardest hits are huge sellers, there's a level at which concussions are glamorized and the subject is treated as fun without a consciousness of real ramifications.''

By the NFL's own estimates, every two games played produces a concussion. At the high school level, one in every five players will sustain some form of a concussion during their playing days.

With concussions becoming so commonplace in football, some of the nation's leading experts on sports injuries worry that football helmets are no longer adequate to protect athletes, especially at the high school level, where equipment often is outdated and ill-fitted.

They also are concerned that NFL stars who sustain concussions, like Young of the 49ers, give a bad example to young athletes by continuing to play football after repeated blows to the head.

``Everybody wants to perform, and if there is one chance in 10,000 of long-term damage, these people say, `It's such a small risk, I'll take it,' '' said Dr. Stephen Rice, program director for the Primary Care Sports Medicine Fellowship at the Jersey Shore Medical Center in Neptune, N.J.

Formerly with the University of Washington, where he tracked sports injuries in Washington high schools, Rice believes many concussions go unreported even though the dangers of head injuries have become more documented.

``There seems to be a motive where people don't want to admit or tell you that they're having problems, especially now when we are growing more conservative in how we're managing them,'' Rice said. ``If they want to keep playing, they don't want to go around announcing that they just got their bell rung. That makes it even harder to sort out who's coming forward.''

Dr. Robert Cantu, past president of the American College of Sports Medicine and director of the National Center for Catastrophic Sports Injury Research, questions whether football helmets do enough to protect athletes. In an article for the NCAA Sports Sciences newsletter, Cantu notes that none of the football helmets on the market protect a player's neck and none are specifically designed to reduce concussions.

Cantu believes that the force of impact to the brain could be reduced by increasing the padding thickness in the helmet or by transmitting the force of the blow to the shoulder pads.

Some ideas being researched include an airbag-type system, a system in which a helmet is fixed to a shoulder pad or flak jacket, and a system of locking the helmet to the shoulder pads upon heavy impact.

``It is time to see if a football helmet can be made that will reduce dramatically or eliminate the chance of concussion,'' Cantu wrote.

Bicycle helmets, Rice notes, could provide a good example of where to start. Most quality bicycle helmets contain not only a layer of hard plastic but some form of polyurethane liner to absorb and lessen the impact.

``The way in which the helmet does its function is really two-fold,'' he said. ``You want to take a blow that's limited to one area and spread it out over as large an area as possible, and then have some kind of material that can absorb shock.''

With the number of well-publicized concussions in pro football, the NFL no longer is sitting on the sidelines. In fact, New York Jets team internist Dr. Elliot Pellman, head of the NFL's subcommittee on concussions, has begun major exploratory work on redesigning helmets to reduce the number of serious head injuries.

The league is well aware it has a problem. In 1995, it convened the subcommittee to determine if players needed better education about concussions and how to avoid them.

The committee found that many concussions never were reported in the first place.

``The committee's feeling is that the rate of concussions has not increased, but they have changed the definition of concussion to include just about anything that is some kind of head injury that affects a player's brain function in some way, whether he's dizzy or doesn't feel good, and they will diagnose a concussion,'' said Greg Aiello, NFL spokesman. ``In the past they might not have been diagnosed as anything.

``What we understand from the doctors is that there is no universally accepted definition in the medical world of what constitutes a concussion.''

Rice acknowledges that there are problems with defining concussions. But he believes they are happening with more frequency because athletes have become bigger, faster and stronger. He also speculates that improvement in equipment has given players a false sense that they can use their bodies as weapons.

``Did this all happen before and we were just missing it all?'' he asked. ``Or is there something about the size, the players, the techniques that makes it more dangerous? The shoulder pads weren't as good, and if you whacked someone with all your might, it would really hurt you. Now you could run into a steel wall and nothing would happen to you.''