According to a recent North American sports study, the rate of serious head injuries among professional mixed martial arts (MMA) athletes is potentially twice that of professional football players. With this relatively new sport exploding in popularity in recent years, especially among youth, this latest study suggests new rules may be needed to protect kids and professionals alike from repeated traumatic brain injuries. Michael Hutchison, a researcher at the University of Toronto who led the work, said:
“When people compare mixed martial arts to other sports, we need to take into account the risk of persistent effects down the line.”
MMA’s popularity, which combines techniques and skills from a variety of fight disciplines including judo, karate and kickboxing, has expanded internationally in recent years. MMA gyms and training facilities have sprung up in many towns and cities across the US and this form of freestyle competitive fighting has quickly eclipsed other, more limited combative sports such as karate, wrestling, and boxing. Professional MMA matches are now legal in all states except New York.
MMA Needs More Analysis to Determine Head Injury Risk and Frequency
In the past, MMA competitors’ risk of brain injury hadn’t been well studied, according to Hutchison and his coauthors. The highly physical nature of the contact sport – which some critics consider dangerous or violent – triggered researchers’ curiosity about just how high of a risk these competitors face of being knocked unconscious repeatedly.
The Toronto-based team took a close look at video recordings of 844 professional MMA matches sponsored by the Ultimate Fighting Championship – the largest and oldest MMA promoter in the world – to count two types of events.
First, researchers looked for knock-out events, in which players are literally knocked unconscious. Second, they focused on technical knock-outs, an event in which a referee or other authority judges that a player is too disoriented to successfully defend him/herself. Both types of knockouts end the match decisively.
The researchers also used statistics to evaluate which factors were associated with a player having a higher risk of a knockout or a technical knockout due to being struck multiple times. They found that competitors suffered a knockout in nearly 12.7 percent of matches, and that a technical knockout took place nearly 19 percent of the time. These figures meant that nearly one-third of all matches ended as a result of some manner of head injury.
These numbers mean that out of every 100 matches in which an MMA participant could be knocked out, referred to as an athlete exposure, the injury would happen 6.4 times. Comparable concussion rates for boxing and kickboxing were found to be 4.9 and 1.9 per 100 exposures, respectively.
Researchers Suggest Banning Youth MMA, Changing Rules to Prevent Multiple Concussion Injuries
If all knockouts and technical knockouts are counted as concussions, the rate among professional MMA athletes seen in the study turned out to be close to 16 per 100 athlete exposures. It’s tempting to compare those statistics to rates of concussions in sports such as football, which has been found to have 8.08 concussions per 100 plays, and ice hockey, with 2.2 concussions per 100 athlete-encounters.
However, the research team was reluctant to generalize in this way because of the uncertainty over how many technical knockouts really included concussions. Hutchison said:
“Is this more dangerous than other sports? We really are not quite there yet, because it’s one thing to look at how likely an event (such as a knockout) is to happen, and another to look at how long the effects will last.”
Still, the researchers recommended that all children be banned from participating in the sport, noting that medical associations in the U.S., Canada and Australia have made the same recommendation. Rule changes that encourage referees to step in more quickly and train them to recognize the symptoms of concussions could also help to protect professional fighters from the long term dangers of repeated brain injuries, such as those presently seen in ex-NFL players today, the researchers said.
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