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The Big Ten/CIC-Ivy League Traumatic Brain Injury Research Collaboration has been named a regional partner of  the NCAA/U.S. Department of Defense's landmark $30 million initiative to enhance the safety of student-athletes and service members.

Announced at the White House Healthy Kids & Safe Sports Concussion Summit, the NCAA-DoD joint initiative will include the most comprehensive study of concussion and head impact exposure ever conducted. 

Roughly 75 percent of the money will fund the study, which will enroll an estimated 37,000 male and female NCAA student-athletes over the three-year study period. Participants will receive a comprehensive preseason evaluation for concussion and will be monitored in the event of an injury. The investigation will be the largest ever of its type, offering critical insight to the risks, treatment and management of concussion.

The remaining 25 percent of the funding will finance an educational grand challenge aimed at changing important concussion safety behaviors and the culture of concussion reporting and management. 

The research will be managed by the Concussion Assessment, Research and Education Consortium, or CARE, co-chaired by principal investigators at three research institutions:

• Indiana University will serve as the Administrative and Operations Core and will be the central coordination center for the CARE Consortium. Led by Thomas W. McAllister, M.D., chair of the IU School of Medicine Department of Psychiatry, Indiana will provide fiduciary oversight as well as data and analysis management, bioinformatics, biospecimen, and clinical trial support resources for the Consortium.
• The University of Michigan will lead the Longitudinal Clinical Study Core, a prospective, multi-institution clinical research protocol whose aim will be to study the natural history of concussion among NCAA student-athletes.  This investigation will be the largest ever of its type. Steven Broglio, Ph.D., ATC, associate professor in the School of Kinesiology and director of the NeuroSport Research Laboratory, will lead the effort.
• The Medical College of Wisconsin will direct the Advanced Research Core. Led by Dr. Michael McCrea, Professor of Neurosurgery and Director of Brain Injury Research at MCW, this effort will include cutting-edge studies that incorporate head impact sensor technologies, advanced neuroimaging, biological markers and detailed clinical studies to examine the acute effects and early pattern of recovery from sport-related concussion.  Ultimately, the work is designed to more fully inform a comprehensive understanding of sport-related concussion and traumatic brain injury.

The Big Ten/CIC-Ivy League Traumatic Brain Injury Research Collaboration is a 23-university collaborative that fosters multi-institutional, cross-conference research efforts centered on the prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of TBI and sports concussion. Representatives from across university areas such as athletic medicine, neurology, neuropsychology, physics, engineering and biological sciences are collaborating  on TBI research that will result in evidence-based clinical assessment, treatment, and establishment of protocols.

For more on The Big Ten/CIC-Ivy League Traumatic Brain Injury Research Collaboration, please visit the Collaborative's home page.

Portions contributed by NCAA.