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News Nuggets, 06.16.04
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NOTES FROM ECU AND BEYOND...
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Compiled from staff reports
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Crucial vote looms as heart
center clears committees
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A pair of House panels signed off on
funding Tuesday for East Carolina University's long-planned Cardiovascular
Diseases Institute and a major overhaul and upgrade of the cancer center at
UNC-Chapel Hill.
A contingent of ECU officials, led by
Chancellor Steven Ballard, and prominent representatives of the Greenville
business community spent the day in Raleigh shoring up support for the
cardio center and monitoring the progress of the bill.
Two members of the ECU delegation
indicated Tuesday night they viewed the votes in the House Appropriations
Committee and the House Finance Committee as positive steps in a logical
process, but they each noted that final passage in the chamber is contingent
upon a vote expected to take place some time this afternoon by the full
House.
Altogether, the House panels authorized
more than $330 million dollars in appropriations for the Greenville and
Chapel Hill projects
as well as more recently-formulated capital requests from three other
campuses in the UNC System.
The total appropriation would include the
$240 million for the cardio and cancer centers that received Senate approval
last month and additional tens of millions for projects at UNC-Charlotte,
UNC-Asheville and Elizabeth City State University.
ECU officials have said in the past the $60 million
sought by the school would be used for a research and treatment center,
supplementing an additional $150 million private investment by University
Health Systems for a 120-150 bed heart hospital.
The capital items passed Tuesday by the
House panels that were not included in the Senate bill include a
bioinformatics
center at UNC-Charlotte, a wellness center at UNC-Asheville and a school of
pharmacy Elizabeth City State University.
If the bill clears the House today in its
present form, the House and Senate Conference Committee will ultimately be
relegated with the task of cobbling together compromise legislation.
Much of Tuesday's drama revolved around
how the appropriation would be paid for. The Finance Committee voted to use
money from North Carolina's share of the national tobacco settlement with
cigarette companies, but the Appropriations Committee overturned that
provision in favor of a less contentious course of financing.
During the course of the deliberation in
both the Senate and House, ECU officials have relied on the school's
Purple Alert initiative to keep alumni
and other constituents informed of the cardio center's fortunes in the
legislature and to encourage allies to help make the case with their
legislators on behalf of the project.
Indications are that school leaders are
counting on those advocacy efforts to continue as today's House vote
approaches and in the period leading up to any House and Senate Conference
Committee deliberations to resolve the final shape of the legislation.
Concussions more prevalent than thought
INDIANAPOLIS — Most serious head injuries in college
football are never reported to team trainers or coaches because the players
don't think their symptoms are severe enough to indicate a concussion,
according to a new Indiana State University study.
That lack of knowledge could be putting athletes at
risk for more severe injury, or even death, researchers say.
"When your head is messed up, you may not know it
yourself," said JoEllen Sefton, a doctoral fellow in sports medicine who
surveyed 457 players, 38 coaches and eight trainers from eight NCAA Division
I-A, I-AA and II colleges.
Coaches, players, athletic administrators and medical
personnel have long known the risks of injury to the brain. But Sefton's
2002 survey, to be presented Saturday at the National Athletic Trainers
Association meeting in Baltimore, indicates nearly three of every four
concussions go unreported.
A concussion is a blow to the head that jostles the
brain and can cause brain swelling, blood vessel damage and even death.
Symptoms can include headache, confusion, loss of consciousness and nausea.
A study funded in part by the NCAA and published last
November by the Journal of the American Medical Association found college
players who suffer concussions are more prone to another one, especially if
they return to the field too soon. They also become slower to recover from
blows to the head, researchers said.
"There's a condition called second impact syndrome,"
said Mitchell Cordova, chairman of the athletic training department at
Indiana State. "An athlete takes a subsequent hit that may be less severe
than the first hit but receives a greater injury because the symptoms from
the initial incident are not completely resolved."
Several pro football players have ended their careers
early after suffering multiple concussions, including quarterbacks Troy
Aikman of the Dallas Cowboys and Steve Young of the San Francisco 49ers.
The Indiana State study, published in the April-June
issue of the Journal of Athletic Training, gave players a list of symptoms
and asked them to identify which were associated with concussions and which
were not. It asked players how many of those symptoms they had experienced,
and how often they had reported them, after a hit in the head.
Sefton said those surveyed suffered symptoms consistent
with concussion 391 times — 21 percent of them more than once. But 72
percent of the symptoms were not reported, primarily because the athlete did
not think the injury was serious, she said.
The study also indicated many players had
misconceptions about what signals a concussion.
For example, some players mistakenly thought they could
not have suffered a concussion because they did not have a headache.
"If they had trouble sleeping at night or were
depressed or had emotional outbursts — all symptoms of concussion — if they
didn't know those were symptoms, they might not connect that with the hit in
the head they had that day," Sefton said.
She said the more athletes know about concussions, the
more likely they are to report them.
"We need to develop an education program for athletes
for head injuries," she said. "We have them for drug abuse, we have them for
nutrition and eating disorders, for smoking, but we don't have anything for
head injuries."
News Nuggets are
compiled periodically from staff, ECU, Conference USA and its member
schools, and from Associated Press and
other reports. Copyright 2004
Bonesville.net and other publishers. All rights reserved. This material may not be
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