← Cranial Cooling › Concussion Hub
An educational hub: what a concussion actually is, how it’s assessed, and the tools and measurements clinicians use — written plainly, sized to the evidence, and device-agnostic. This explains the landscape the Concussion Cooling Study is built on; it is not medical advice.
What's inside the hub
A plain-language tour of the landscape the Concussion Cooling Study is built on — what the injury is, how it's assessed, the tools clinicians use, and the biological signals that make it measurable.
What a concussion actually is — a functional injury a normal scan won't rule out.
Recognise, remove, assess, return — and what ImPACT and Sway actually measure.
GFAP, UCH-L1, and NfL — the objective, quantitative axis alongside symptoms.
The basics
A concussion (mild traumatic brain injury) is a transient disruption of how the brain functions, driven by a metabolic disturbance rather than visible structural damage.WP-03 That is why conventional imaging — designed to find bleeds and fractures — is, by design, insensitive to it: most sport concussions are CT-negative.WP-04
One manifestation of that metabolic disturbance is a brief rise in brain temperature, and because neuronal energy demand rises with temperature, the acute window is the period clinicians watch most closely.WP-03
In plain terms
How it’s assessed
Current consensus care emphasises recognising the injury, removing the athlete from play, assessing with validated tools, and a graduated, clinician-governed return to activity.1 Assessment draws on several complementary layers.
Structured self-report of headache, fog, balance, light and noise sensitivity, and mood — tracked over time against the person’s own baseline.
Validated, often FDA-cleared platforms measure reaction time, memory, and postural stability — ideally compared to a pre-season baseline.
The clinician integrates the above with the mechanism of injury and exam findings. Return-to-play is a clinical decision, never an automatic score.
The assessment tools
A computerised neurocognitive test (Immediate Post-Concussion Assessment and Cognitive Testing) widely used to establish a baseline before a season and to measure cognition — memory, processing speed, reaction time — after a suspected concussion. It is one validated input to a clinician’s decision, not a stand-alone diagnosis.
Official ImPACT resource ↗A mobile platform that uses a device’s motion sensors to measure balance and postural stability alongside cognitive tasks, enabling baseline and sideline assessment. Like ImPACT, it contributes objective data to a clinician-governed evaluation.
Official Sway resource ↗The biological axis
Fluid biomarkers add an objective, quantitative signal alongside symptoms and cognition. They are used here as intermediate endpoints, not as a diagnosis of concussion.
Evidentiary status
Established: GFAP/UCH-L1 for acute CT-triage; NfL as a sensitive axonal-injury marker.
Not established: using these to grade concussion severity or to monitor recovery — these remain study questions, treated as exploratory.
Where the hub meets the study
The hub explains the landscape; the study tests one question within it — whether cooling the brain early changes the course of injury. Cooling is layered onto standard care; clinical judgment governs return-to-play; the study is device-agnostic and admits any cooling method investigators approve.
Symptom trajectory and recovery time, acute biomarkers (GFAP / UCH-L1), instrumented thermal data, and comfort/adherence — within a season.
Cumulative head-impact exposure, the axonal marker NfL, and serial cognition across and beyond a career — contributing to the long-horizon question rather than presuming to resolve it.
The thermal-dimension and biomarker detail behind the claims marked WP-03 and WP-04 is held in those papers. ImPACT and Sway link to their official resources above. Descriptive, not diagnostic; not medical advice.