Week 1, Day 2

This focus of this week is primarily educational, to get everyone up to speed about the science regarding concussions, and to focus on remote teamwork. The end of this week and the start of next week will focus on writing the Concussion Update newsletter; the next edition of the newsletter comes out on June 25. After the newsletter, we will launch into projects.

There is one task to do today:

  • Discussion reflection/write-up. Based on our initial discussion today regarding the 5th Consensus Statement, we’d like you to take a bit of time and write up some responses to the discussion questions, which we’ll be talking about tomorrow before Galen’s module

  • If you have not already done so, take the online Personality Assessment for the 5 Languages of Appreciation at Work; we’d like them all completed before Wednesday morning.

Educational Resources - Sex Differences in Concussions, Dr. Valera’s work, Newsletter Prep:

Today we are highlighting the readings to prepare for Dr. Valera’s talk on Thursday; we wanted to take the opportunity to focus our educational materials on sex differences in concussion incidences, impacts, and outcomes. Additionally, please familiarize yourself with the style, structure, and format of the Newsletter.

Materials, & Resources

Guest Speaker Series: Eve Valera

We’re very excited to begin our Guest Speaker Series this week with a member of our Professional Advisory Board, Dr. Eve Valera! In addition to her bio, which is linked in the header and the previous sentence, Dr. Valera has provided a couple of documents for you to read before she speaks on Thursday. Read both of these carefully, as they’ll be the foundation for her talk. In addition, please come up with 2-3 questions for Eve.

Sex Differences in Concussion

  1. Read through our page on Women & Girls, which can be found on our “Populations” section.

  2. Read CA volunteer Micalie Hunt’s blog post on concussions in Women’s Soccer and its references.

  3. Read this one-page document which has the text that we wrote for the upcoming edition of the Brain Injury Professional Magazine, which focuses on women and concussions. It was an honor to be asked to contribute to this magazine, which is the largest professional brain injury publication in the world, with 30,000 subscribers around the world.

  4. Watch the following (~3-6 minute) videos from Pink Concussions Expert Interviews page. Note: these interviews were recorded in 2016-17. If you are interested, there are more videos on Pink Concussions’ page, but these are the only mandatory ones.

    1. Dr. Ann Rasmusson speaks about her research on progesterone metabolites

    2. Dr. Jeff Bazarian speaks about his research on the impact of the menstrual cycle on concussion outcomes

    3. Dr. Gwen Hunnicutt speaks about research about IPV related TBI and raising awareness among practitioners.

    4. Glynnis Zieman speaks about providing brain injury care for female domestic violence victims.

    5. Dr. Cindy Chang speaks about dissimilarities between male and female mTBI sufferers in sports medicine.

    6. Dr. Chris Giza speaks about shifting the focus from solely male subjects in research to including work on females.

    7. Dr. John Leddy describes his research on altered brain blood flow in females.

    8. Dr. Stephanie Kolakowsky-Hayner contrasts female and male concussion recovery and discusses the role of exercise.

    9. Dr. Jamshid Ghajar speaks about pathophysiological sex differences in susceptibility, as well as diagnosis standards (and eye tracking)

    10. Dr. Monique Pappadis speaks about gaps in knowledge regarding ethnic minority females and about her work sexual dissatisfaction in females post-concussion.

Newsletter

Please begin to familiarize yourselves with past newsletters. We would like you to read three newsletters of your choosing. However, one must have been written on or before 11/19 and the two others must be from 2020. Make sure that they are not announcements.