← Cranial Cooling › Concussion Hub
The educational landscape the Concussion Cooling Study is built on — written plainly, device-agnostic, and sized to the evidence. Not medical advice.
What's inside the hub
What the injury is, how it’s assessed, the tools clinicians use, and the 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 study tests one question — whether cooling the brain early changes the course of injury. Cooling layers onto standard care; clinical judgment governs return-to-play; any cooling method investigators approve is admitted.
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.