By Les Carpenter
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, June 19, 2007

By late yesterday, some of the nation's top concussion researchers were making their way to a Chicago suburb in preparation for an all-day presentation today to NFL team doctors and trainers. They hope it will be a revolutionary seminar that will lead to new ways that professional football players are treated for concussions in games and practices.

And the researchers express cautious optimism that a new commissioner, Roger Goodell, is interested in changing a system they don't think was always open to new concussion research.

But with that hope also comes a fear that the day is simply a facade designed to make an offseason of bad headlines about concussions go away.

"I want to be optimistic and encouraged," said Julian Bailes, the chair of West Virginia University's Department of Neurosurgery.

Of most concern to several doctors is the amount of time each speaker will be allotted. The league has invited a handful of specialists in the field and will have some of its own advisers, and a seminar that normally would take two days has been squeezed into about seven hours. Most presentations will only be 10-15 minutes, which doesn't leave much time for the slide shows and PowerPoint presentations doctors often make at such meetings.

For instance, at a concussion conference two months ago in Los Angeles, many of the same presenters who will be at the NFL seminar made hour-long speeches. This seminar's timeframe could mean that important facts or examples will be left out and might dilute the impact of what the doctors are trying to say.

At the Los Angeles seminar, Bennett Omalu, a forensic pathologist who has drawn a link to head trauma in football and brain conditions such as dementia, gave a sobering talk complete with autopsy photos of two of the players he studied -- Mike Webster and Terry Long. Bailes will be making a shorter version of the same talk and certainly won't be able to discuss it in as great detail.

"The fact is it took me four hours to put together 10 thoughts," said Mark Lovell, founder of the sports medicine concussion program that the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center who had to significantly cut down his normal presentation. But Lovell, who sits on the league's Mild Traumatic Brain Injury (MBTI) committee, also said that there will be so many speakers representing different schools of thought on the subject that there really wasn't another way to organize the event.

Concussions have become a significant issue in recent months as more doctors question whether the NFL has been serious about addressing safety. Some members of the league's MBTI committee have been critical of new research, saying it lacks depth. As recently as 2004, the committee said it had not found permanent effects of multiple concussions. Several doctors, including Bailes, believe three concussions can have lifelong effects.

"We labored in obscurity for many years and they're still criticizing us," Bailes said.

With so much talk about concussions and football-related trauma, the NFL has made some changes to the way it addresses head injuries. Last month, Goodell introduced a whistleblower program in which players who have had concussions can complain if they feel they are being pushed to play too soon after their injury.

All players are required to have neurological baseline testing to determine normal brain function, which can be matched to a similar test after a concussion to determine how much function has been affected. Likewise, team doctors will now make all decisions about when a player can come back, presumably without interference from players or coaches.

Bailes said he has heard from team doctors and trainers curious about the research into long-term effects of concussions, but was somewhat surprised that there was not more interest given the damage it can cause later in life.

"I think they are looking to the league and the league's MTBI committee and the commissioner for leadership," Bailes said.

Speakers today will talk about subjects such as when a player with concussions should retire, an evaluation of current concussion guidelines, the effects concussions might have on depression and an analysis of data collected around the NFL the last five years, which will be presented by Lovell.

"We can certainly, accurately measure very subtle changes in brain function," Lovell said. "Ten or 15 years ago, much of that would not have been detectable."

Lovell said he is amazed to see how quickly professional athletes recover from brain injuries, surmising that perhaps those players susceptible to concussions had given up football because of repeated head trauma at a younger age. However, he said, that does not mean there isn't a concussion problem in the NFL.

"I think it needs to be discussed in a very sophisticated way," he said.