(CNN) – The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has issued guidelines for the first time on treating children with concussions, saying they will provide doctors with the “tools they need to ensure the best outcomes for their young patients” with mild traumatic brain injury.
More than 800,000 children seek treatment for traumatic brain injury every year, according to Dr. Debra Houry, director of the CDC’s National Center for Injury Prevention and Control. The issue has become more pressing as youth sports have grown in popularity and because research has shown that repeated blows to the head, such as from playing football or heading a soccer ball, can lead to long-term memory loss, dementia and other serious health issues.
The CDC said its guidelines were based on the “most comprehensive review of the science” over the past 25 years related concussions, which doctors and researchers refer to as mild traumatic brain injury, or mTBI.
Use validated, age-appropriate symptom scales to diagnose a concussion.
In an accompanying editorial, Michael McCrea, a professor of neurosurgery and neurology at the Medical College of Wisconsin, and Dr. Geoff Manley, vice chairman of neurological surgery at the University of California, San Francisco, praised the CDC for issuing the guidelines, saying that “clinicians have been hampered for years by the lack of an evidence base to inform diagnosis, prognosis, and management” of youth concussions.
“We applaud the CDC guideline’s recommendation for clinicians to counsel children and their parents as to the known acute effects of injury, expected course of recovery, and factors that may positively or negatively affect recovery and outcome after mTBI,” McCrea and Manley wrote.