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"  Credit: University of Rochester As a running back is being tackled by a 300-pound defensive lineman, his helmet bounces on the turf. He comes up woozy enough that the trainers on the sideline run the player through a battery of tests. Still, these first exams are not conclusive, and so team docs run the player into the locker room for additional tests. Athletes and their teams have become much more conscious of brain injuries and careful about concussions over the last few years\u2014Kansas City Chiefs star running back Jamaal Charles, who suffered an injury similar to what is described above in an NFL playoff game this past weekend, and didn&amp;#039;t return to the game. However, the tools team doctors have at their disposal to diagnose a concussion are lacking, and typically rely on whether a player has severe headaches or confusion. Researchers are looking for a better way to detect a true concussion\u2014a biomarker that&amp;#039;s not open to interpretation. Jeffrey Bazarian of the University of Rochester might have one in the form of a brain protein called S100B, which appears in the bloodstream after a brain injury. He&amp;#039;s the author of a new study of college athletes and head injury in the journal PLoS One. If he&amp;#039;s right, perhaps one day a finger-stick blood test on the field could diagnose a concussion. Bazarian led a study that tracked 46 athlete volunteers in total, coming from the University of Rochester football, soccer, and basketball teams, the Rochester Institute of Technology ice hockey team, and the Staubing Tigers semi-pro hockey club from Germany. Over the course of the study, 22 of the 46 suffered a concussion as confirmed by a doctor. Seventeen of those 22 were tested for the S100B brain protein with three hours of their injury. The result: Levels of S100B were 81 percent higher than their baseline levels. The tricky part of this test is that brain protein levels are naturally higher after physical exercise, so Bazarian had to separate the effect of exercise from the effect of brain injury. According to the study, however, the protein levels in the college athletes rose by just 2 percent after physical exertion, nowhere near the 81 percent increase after a concussion. One question yet to be resolved is how much S100B levels increase after a hard hit that&amp;#039;s jarring to brain but not serious enough to cause a concussion. Bazarian has studied those kinds of hits in the past, University of Rochester Medical Center press officer Leslie Orr tells PopMech, but it wasn&amp;#039;t a part of this new study. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/health/a9868/a-quick-blood-test-for-concussions-16359707/>