WHS senior spends summer studying concussions

A Westlake High School senior spent her summer researching a hot topic in sports medicine – the impact of concussions.

Lauren Choban spent her summer as a science intern at the Spine Research Laboratory at Lutheran Hospital. The Cleveland Clinic Office of Civic Education Initiatives Summer Internship Program is a paid nine-week program that fosters 21st-century skills where students explore science and various health careers through one-on-one mentoring relationships with Cleveland Clinic doctors. Students work with caregivers, medical students and internship alumni.

Lauren’s internship culminated with a research report entitled “Cleveland Clinic Concussion Experience.” She extracted concussion data from the Cleveland Clinic’s database of the 13,000 student athletes Cleveland Clinic Sports Health oversees in Northeast Ohio. She digitized the data into an Excel spreadsheet and analyzed scores for athletes ages 13 to 20 who participated in basketball, football, soccer, lacrosse and wrestling.

Lauren concluded that current neurocognitive and motor assessments are satisfactory in tracking recovery and return to play time for student athletes. She recommended future assessments analyze the effect of gender on concussion tests, examine a larger population of athletes and compare baseline scores to post-concussion scores.

The Cleveland Clinic program hosted 133 students over the summer from 80 schools in 16 Northeast Ohio counties.

To see more of Lauren’s research visit www.clevelandclinic.org/myRESEARCH. Click on 2011 interns and scroll down to Lauren’s name.