JMS Hockey

WIRED article: https://www.wired.com/2017/01/mere-prick-finger-can-diagnose-concussion/ Quotes: When your head takes a hit ... your brain is subjected to shear forces that can actually tear it apart from the inside... Axons, the long, stretched-out arms of neurons that allow them to talk to each other, get frayed and severed. [This releases] proteins into the cerebral spinal fluid. ... The more damage, the higher the blood protein concentration ... [but so] few of the proteins end up in the blood that no one’s been able to detect them. “It’s like trying to find grains of sand in a thousand Olympic-size swimming pools,” says Jessica Gill, a researcher at the National Institutes of Health. Simoa’s robotic arms first mix the blood with magnetic beads coated in a tau-binding antibody. ... Another robotic arm pours the sample onto a CD-shaped disk laser-etched with 24 rectangles. Each of these grids contains 216,000 wells that hold 10^-15 liters each—enough space for exactly one magnetic bead. Once all the beads settle into their wells, a computer takes a snapshot of the disc and analyzes how many wells light up. A little bit of complicated computation later, and you know exactly how much tau protein is in your blood sample. Gill’s team found that concussed players had elevated levels of tau protein ... often for days after the injury. And as they monitored different athletes’ recoveries, they saw that tau levels closely predicted not only the severity of the injury, but the amount of time needed before the players could return to activity. The goal is to get the test sensitive enough to have a tau readout within 15 minutes of the injury.

awesome article. this should silence Bettman and all the deniers of concussions.

I hear ya Haakan, but denial is seemingly their only strategy against the impending lawsuits.

no doubt! the even more disturbing thing is that the virginia tech helmet study was updated and there are still no helmets manufactured that are better than 3/5 stars! That's really sad!!!!