Pecker Wood

We’re finding out all kinds of new facts about the health risks to highly competitive athletes, stuff you wouldn’t expect. For example super-endurance athletes face the “athletic heart syndrome” (an enlarged heart), small muscle tears to the hearts of some of most extreme endurance participants (causing permanent damage), or the dangerous presence of a heart enzyme called cardiac troponin I, which happens to be the most sensitive and specific marker for the detection of heart-muscle death, some of which leads to heart attacks immediately (as with the presence of excessive troponin) or, more likely, later in life.

And, in addition to the immediate blurred vision, loss of balance, speech impairments, headaches and disorientation, we’ve all been watching the increased depression or dementia that seems to accompany athletes, particularly in the hard contact sports of ice hockey and football, who have had three or more concussions. Some of these symptoms don’t appear until decades after the athlete has stopped practicing his or her sport. Some effects, as reflected in the suicides of several younger ice hockey plays, occur a whole lot sooner. And currently, helmets are more protection against skull fracture than they are against concussions. “Remember that helmets do not prevent concussions, but putting protection on the head to limit any blow or linear force to the head can only help combat one of the big problems with re-occurrence: smaller required forces. It should be well-known by now that after sustaining one concussion the research suggests that it takes less force to contribute to another cascade process resulting in a concussion.” StopConcussions.com, April 1^st.

First, what is a concussion? It is often confused with other forms of milder brain injury (which are more properly termed “mild traumatic brain injury” {MTBI}), a general category which does include concussions. The latter, technically-speaking, come from a violent shaking of the brain and often result in stretching of brain tissue. This shaking can come from pure shaking, a blow to the head, or any number of collision types. In the NFL, the forces that slam players together often mirror a head-on collision between two cars. While the damage can be worse in the larger, stronger sports professionals, some of these issues remain relevant for amateur and high school/college players as well. Some sports, like boxing, actually are built on the premise of causing a concussion in an opponent (a knockout).

There is a lot of pressure to build helmets that do more than stop skull fractures, but no one has really created a helmet that adds much of a difference. So scientists have looked to nature to see real-world examples of animals which routinely live with violent blows to the head, most notably the humble woodpecker, whose beak slams repeatedly into tree bark and wood in its quest for insects. This jackhammer effect is a violent stress on the bird’s head, but nature seems to have addressed the issue in a way that might lead researchers to solutions for human beings as well: “Woodpeckers' head-pounding pecking against trees and telephone poles subjects them to enormous forces — they can easily slam their beaks against wood with a force 1,000 times that of gravity. (In comparison, Air Force tests in the 1950s pegged the maximum survivable g-force for a human at around 46 times that of gravity, though race-car drivers have reportedly survived crashes of over 100 G's.)

“Researchers had previously figured out that thick neck muscles diffuse the blow, and a third inner eyelid prevents the birds' eyeballs from popping out… Notably, the woodpecker's brain is surrounded by thick, platelike spongy bone. At a microscopic level, woodpeckers have a large number of trabeculae, tiny beamlike projections of bone that form the mineral ‘mesh’ that makes up this spongy bone plate. These trabeculae are also closer together than they are in [a] skylark skull, suggesting this microstructure acts as armor protecting the brain… The woodpecker's beak does not differ much from the lark's in strength, but it contains many microscopic rod structures and thinner trabeculae. It's possible that the beak is adapted to deform during pecking, absorbing the impact instead of transferring it toward the brain, the researchers report in the journal Science China Life Sciences.” Huffington Post, April 10^th. With 50,000 U.S. deaths from brain trauma every year, and the ancillary symptoms noted above, research into this area is most necessary.

If sports equipment, from neck protectors to helmets, can be constructed to mirror “woodpecker technology,” we can expect to see some mitigation is this life impairing (if not ending) trauma, but it does help to understand the limitations of today’s helmets and padding.

I’m Peter Dekom, and when we can’t solve some of life problems, it is not stupid to look to solutions that nature has provided for millennia.