Mounting evidence from several studies suggests women exhibit different responses to these head injuries and may benefit from gender-specific treatment, according to the report. However, such little concussion research is done on female brains, there is not enough data to create treatment guidelines for women.
Angela Colantonio, director of the Rehabilitation Science Institute at the University of Toronto, looked at 200 studies on prognosis after mild traumatic brain injury and found only 7 percent of the studies separated out women in the research. Of the 377 brains donated for research to Boston Universities’ brain bank, only four belonged to women.
“If concussion is the invisible injury, then females are the invisible population within that injury,” said Katherine Snedaker, a licensed clinical social worker from Norwalk, Conn.
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