Often overlooked amid the competitive exploits of the Big Ten Conference is the league’s academic counterpart, a decades-old consortium of research institutions that focuses more on collaboration than game-day conquests.
The members of the Committee on Institutional Cooperation—the dozen Big Ten colleges plus the University of Chicago—have worked together over the years to digitize library collections, negotiate lower prices for laboratory supplies and networking systems, and occasionally strike deals for cheaper dormitory mattresses, among other things.
But now, for what is believed to be the first time since its formation in 1958, the group is putting its weight behind a research project with a direct link to athletics.
Troubled by recent medical research on the devastating impact of sport-related brain injuries, a group of faculty members is in the early stages of creating a centralized data-sharing platform that it hopes will enhance existing research and accelerate new inquiries into concussions. Eventually, the professors aim to involve the Big Ten’s thousands of elite athletes in long-term studies on concussions and possibly a range of other injuries and health matters.
“This is the deepest collaboration that we’ve launched that covers so many disciplines and really connects so well on both sides,” says Barbara McFadden Allen, the consortium’s executive director. “We partner all the time. We share information all the time. But we really haven’t worked together on an issue in this way.”
The idea emerged from a faculty-led meeting on sport-related concussions held this spring at the Big Ten’s headquarters outside Chicago. There, more than three dozen experts in a variety of fields, including sports medicine, athletic training, ophthalmology, and neurology, shared new and continuing research related to traumatic brain injuries. In the months since, the consortium has built a secure Web site equipped with expansive data storage capable of holding large files like brain scans and other high-resolution images. Those images, along with other yet-to-be-published information, will be available to scholars for use in their own research.
Christie L. Sahley, a professor of biological sciences at Purdue University, says she has high hopes that the Big Ten universities will put their considerable research capabilities to good use.
“We have resources here that other people don’t have,” says Ms. Sahley, who is also Purdue’s faculty athletics representative. The University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, for instance, is one of only a handful of places in the country to possess powerful magnetic-resonance-imaging technology, which produces high-resolution images of the brain. Ms. Sahley said researchers at Minnesota’s Center for Magnetic Resonance Research have agreed to collaborate with the consortium and occasionally make available their 10-tesla magnets. (Most universities, have magnets classified as only 3-tesla.)
The images produced by the high-powered magnets are “crystal clear,” Ms. Sahley says. “You can see exactly where an injury might be.”
At the University of Illinois, in the meantime, researchers have developed a test that measures the reaction time of athletes who’ve sustained a concussion. Another project there has given rise to a type of helmet that cools the brain after a traumatic impact. Both are examples of research that could become part of the centralized database and, eventually, find its way to the sidelines of Big Ten competitions, Ms. Sahley says.
“All of this information is being shared,” she says. “You don’t have to wait till it’s published.”
For the time being, the project’s leaders say they hope the sharing of data from a range of disciplines will prompt a rigorous cross-pollination of ideas.
“It gives us a much more dynamic process,” says Dennis L. Molfese, a professor of psychology at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln and director of its Brain Imaging Center, who is leading the effort. “We’ll be drawing on a larger collection of laboratories, a larger collection of coaches, athletic trainers, scientists, team physicians, all working together on a common problem.”
Long-Term Ambitions
Eventually, faculty members hope, the technological framework now in the works will allow researchers across the 13 institutions to collect and analyze longitudinal data on brain injuries from athletes in the Big Ten. Tracking that kind of injury among athletes in all sports—not just in football, which to date has received the greatest amount of attention for its head injuries—at such a high level of competition would contribute to a more sophisticated understanding about the causes and effects of concussions, faculty say.
But that component of the project is still a long way off.
“We have a pretty good sample size of athletes who compete at the highest level,” says Kerry Kenny, assistant director of compliance at the Big Ten, who serves as the league’s liaison with the faculty members. But as for long-term studies of their afflictions, he says, “It’s still too early to see what it would look like. It would take a good level of buy-in from the student-athletes, coaches, and administrators if we were to go down that route.”
Kevin M. Guskiewicz, a leading researcher in sport-related concussions who has been studying the injury for decades, says the Big Ten’s “multifaceted” approach for this project could be helpful in advancing knowledge about the effects of serious concussions on current and former college athletes. And its ambitious intention of tracking injuries over time would be useful, too, says Mr. Guskiewicz, who chairs the department of exercise and sport science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and directs the university’s Matthew Gfeller Sport-Related Traumatic Brain Injury Research Center.
But he cautions that only a small percentage of concussions are severe or complex enough to require treatment from the additional medical disciplines the consortium is appealing to. Of the 27 athletes who sustained concussions at North Carolina last year, for instance, only one required specialized care: a field-hockey player who had prolonged vision and balance problems and worked for several months with an ophthalmologist for visual therapy.
Wrapping in related fields is fine for research purposes, he says. But if taken too far, it can complicate the current debate over who qualifies as a medical adviser—usually a physician or an athletic trainer—legally entrusted with making the critical decision of when a concussed athlete is cleared to play. “We need some gatekeepers,” Mr. Guskiewicz says. “Every concussion is not going to require a physical therapist, an ophthalmologist, or even a neuropsychologist.”
Maybe not. But when it comes to concussion research, says Ms. Sahley, of Purdue, having one or two brains tackling the problem is fine. Thirteen universities’ worth, she says, is even better.
