Cleo Pallister-Turley, a back for Cardiff university\u2019s women\u2019s rugby team, winces as she recalls two major concussions from playing rugby. \u201cGirls ask me, \u2018aren\u2019t you worried about getting injured?\u2019,\u201d the biomedical sciences student said. \u201cI enjoy the physicality and the intensity. For me, no other sports compare.\u201d<\/p>\n
Women\u2019s rugby has enjoyed significant growth in recent years. Women now make up a quarter of players worldwide, according to World Rugby, and more than 400 clubs offer rugby to women and girls around the UK; in the 1990s, only a handful existed.<\/p>\n
The increase in popularity, however, has not been matched by investment in research to help keep female rugby players safe, despite the now well-known long-term health risks<\/a> of the game\u2019s repetitive head impacts.<\/p>\n At the professional level, the current bar for taking a woman off the pitch for a head injury assessment is simply 12% less than the impact threshold that has been calculated for men \u2013 a potentially dangerous gender research gap that medical engineers at Cardiff University are attempting to remedy with a groundbreaking new study.<\/p>\n Ffion James of Cardiff University female rugby team (centre) with Dr Peter Theobald and PhD researcher Freya Butcher. Photograph: Phil Rees\/Athena Pictures<\/p>\n The researchers from the university\u2019s school of engineering and world-leading brain research imaging centre<\/a> aim to produce the first ever head impact assessment protocol in women\u2019s rugby backed by scientific evidence. The team believe the work will also deliver the first ever academic insights into the relative long-term risks of female contact sport.<\/p>\n Medical engineers have followed the university\u2019s female rugby team during training and matches throughout the academic year, drawing on impact data from the players\u2019 instrumented mouth guards, cognitive tests, MRI scans and computer modelling \u2013 the first time, to the researchers\u2019 knowledge, that all four different strands of research have been conducted on the same group of people.<\/p>\n The findings of the study, titled \u201cTowards precise brain health guidelines for women\u2019s rugby\u201d, should be published by the end of 2026.<\/p>\n Dr Peter Theobald, the project\u2019s lead researcher, said: \u201cWomen\u2019s sports research is historically underrepresented, and with most research we can look 10, 15, 20 years into the past for data, but not with women\u2019s rugby; it hardly existed.<\/p>\n \u201cThe female brain is softer and more vulnerable to concussion \u2026 what we don\u2019t know yet is whether that translates to a greater risk of the effects of subconcussive brain injury.\u201d<\/p>\n The goal of the study is not to dissuade women and girls from taking up rugby, Theobald added, but to \u201cshed light on the risks so people can make an informed decision\u201d.<\/p>\n Taking part in hours-long MRI and other imaging scans at Cardiff\u2019s brain research imaging centre last week, Pallister-Turley and teammate Ffion James said they were thrilled to participate in the study, despite the demands on their time just before the summer exam period and the annual varsity match against Swansea.<\/p>\n The players changed into magenta hospital gowns before technologists helped them clamber up to the machines, legs and bare feet sticking out while the Disney film The Incredibles played on a monitor inside the chamber to keep them entertained.<\/p>\n The state-of-the-art machines \u2013 one of Cardiff\u2019s facility systems is one of only four in the world<\/a> \u2013 hummed and whirred as the rugby players were ferried from one scan to the next.<\/p>\n Dr Peter Theobald with rugby players Ffion James (left) and Cleo Pallister-Turley. Photograph: Phil Rees\/Athena Pictures<\/p>\n \u201cI do feel safer knowing there\u2019s going to be more research,\u201d law student James said, perched on a chair in an examination room in a break between tests. \u201cBefore I step on the pitch, I never think I\u2019m going to get injured, it\u2019s only when you see someone down you think about it.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI feel like I can be part of the change. Even if it\u2019s a small part, it\u2019s exciting, and hopefully in years to come it will make a change for women in sport and women in rugby.\u201d<\/p>\n Pallister-Turley said: \u201cAny injury would be worth the game for me. The reason I play is for my teammates; all my best friends have come through rugby. The group environment is so accepting and so much fun \u2026 it\u2019s love of the game.\u201d<\/p>\n The findings might not make for comforting reading. Studies to date show male rugby players have a 14% higher risk of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a progressive degenerative disease, for every additional year played. Male players with long careers are also at increased risk of dementia and neurodegenerative diseases.<\/p>\n In 2023, more than 300 former football, rugby league and rugby union players in the UK announced a lawsuit against the Welsh Rugby Union, England\u2019s Rugby Football Union and World Rugby over brain damage they claim they suffered playing the game. The case is ongoing.<\/p>\n Freya Butcher, a medical engineering PhD student working on the study, said: \u201cIt\u2019s not as simple as introducing helmets, or changing the rules of the sport, because then other issues would crop up as players compensated for that.<\/p>\n \u201cWomen\u2019s and men\u2019s rugby are played quite differently, and their brains are different anyway, so looking at what happens in the men\u2019s game doesn\u2019t mean we understand the impact on women\u2019s brains and bodies.\u201d<\/p>\n The gender gap in sports and exercise research remains vast. In 2020, an audit found<\/a> that just 6% of sport science research is specifically about female athletes; another, in 2023, found<\/a> more than nine in 10 first (or lead) authors were men, and women made up just 13% of authors.<\/p>\n The work with the rugby team undertaken by Theobald and Butcher will also evaluate how musculoskeletal health, strength and fatigue are influenced by menstruation, and breast health \u2013 another area of sports science that Butcher said is critically understudied.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s still a taboo topic. Sometimes the girls have huge bruises on their breasts and sides after games, and they agree that if it was elsewhere, they wouldn\u2019t hesitate to get it looked at,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n \u201cCompression and impact on the breast may be linked to problems lactating and breastfeeding. But right now, female players don\u2019t have adequate protective wear or strategies for dealing with that.\u201d<\/p>\n On the side of the pitch at Cardiff Arms Park before the annual varsity match against Swansea, each player on the Cardiff women\u2019s rugby team grabbed their personally moulded, Bluetooth-enabled mouthguard, recognisable by the initials on the case.<\/p>\n As the whistle blew and the game got under way, Theobald and Butcher studied a tablet screen that tracked impact on the players\u2019 teeth, used to determine impact on the head and brain.<\/p>\n Cardiff thumped their visitors 81-0, in a match that saw two Swansea players retire with injuries. Before the celebrations began, though, the study participants\u2019 balance and short-term memory were tested so the researchers could figure out later whether the results correlated with the head impact measured by the mouth guards, and MRI scans in the days before and after the match.<\/p>\n \u201c[The study] helps me be less worried,\u201d James said. \u201cI always think, if I have daughters, I know that with this research and hopefully more in years to come, they are going to feel safer stepping on to a rugby pitch \u2026 my parents were terrified, but hopefully, I won\u2019t have to experience that.<\/p>\n \u201cI want my daughters to be able to run on to that pitch and think: \u2018I\u2019m going to be OK.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Cleo Pallister-Turley, a back for Cardiff university\u2019s women\u2019s rugby team, winces as she recalls two major concussions from…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":691081,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[567],"tags":[64,63,760,85],"class_list":["post-691080","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-rugby","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-rugby","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/691080","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=691080"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/691080\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/691081"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=691080"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=691080"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=691080"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}