User:Gillian0423/sandbox

Welcome to your sandbox!
This is place to practice clicking the "edit" button and practice adding references (via the citation button). Please see Help:My_sandbox or contact User_talk:JenOttawa with any questions.

Link: Project Homepage and Resources


 * Note: Please use your sandbox to submit assignment # 3 by pasting it below. When uploading your improvements to the article talk page please share your exact proposed edit (not the full assignment 3).


 * Talk Page Template: CARL Medical Editing Initiative/Fall 2019/Talk Page Template

Assignment #2
1.     I searched for concussion prevention using the MeSH term “brain concussion” and prevention. I also ensured in my search that I was looking for review articles from the last five years.

2.     Here are two of the potential sources I identified:


 * Source 1: Sone, J. Y., Kondziolka, D., Huang, J. H., & Samadani, U. (2017). Helmet efficacy against concussion and traumatic brain injury: a review. Journal of neurosurgery, 126(3), 768-781.
 * Source 2: Register-Mihalik, J., Baugh, C., Kroshus, E., Y. Kerr, Z., & Valovich McLeod, T. C. (2017). A multifactorial approach to sport-related concussion prevention and education: application of the socioecological framework. Journal of athletic training, 52(3), 195-205.

3.     I chose source 1 because of the information discussed within it. This review discussed specifically helmets and there use in concussion prevention as well as it did not focused on a single population. Although some of the articles discussed in the article were sport-related this review seemed more generalized to the whole population than the other article. the source is more related to the current information on our Wikipedia page.

4.     The source is a secondary source as it is a review. The source is recent as it was published within the last five years (2017). The source was fully accessible and is published in a peer-reviewed journal.

5.     This source will provide an up-to-date perspective on helmet use as concussion prevention. Within concussion prevention on the Wikipedia page, there are several statements about concussion prevention, but the sources are older. This review may help to update some of this out-of-date information.

Proposed Change
To replace the following sentence in the "Prevention" section:

Protective equipment such as headgear has been found to reduce the number of concussions in athletes and improvements in the design of helmets may decrease the number and severity further.

I will be inserting the following information:

''Protective equipment such as helmets and other headgear and policy changes such as the banning of body checking in youth hockey leagues have been found to reduce the number and severity of concussions in athletes. Secondary prevention such as a Return to Play Protocol for an athlete may reduce the risk of repeat concussions. ''

Rationale for proposed changes
The sentence being replaced is old and must be updated (sources from 2004 and 2006). Additionally, a more recent source is needed to discuss how changes to rules and policy can prevent concussions. Both articles used are from the British Journal of Sports Medicine and are secondary sources (one of which is a systematic review and the other is a best practices summary). These sources are relatively recent and as such will help to improve the quality of evidence found in this section of the Wikipedia page.

Secondary prevention isn’t mentioned in detail within this section of the article and although I did not add much detail about the steps of secondary prevention (which should eventually be added to this page), it is an important part of concussion prevention to which members of the public should be made aware. Proposed changes should not be seen as ambiguous or controversial although they do perhaps need several follow-up sentences to elaborate on these topics. This is not the scope of this assignment and as such, I have chosen not to elaborate on these subjects.

Critique of Sources
The review by Emergy et al. (2017) is a relatively good source as it is a systematic review that searched 11 databases. This studies were evaluated for bias using the DB checklist and this systematic review did a good job of eliminating or acknowledging biases in the results of the studies. Some biases that still may exist include publication bias as they did not review unpublished articles as well as language bias as part of the exclusion criteria was studies that were not in english. Measurement bias was also noted to be quite common within the papers studied as the definition and diagnosis of a concussion can be subjective. This bias is likely non-differential. Of the studies selected, only one paper was for exclusively female athletes and 6 studies looked at both genders, as such, this study may not accurately represent the effects in female athletes.

The practice guideline by Harmon et al. (2017) is also a very reliable source for current information on concussions. Because a practice guideline is a collection of high quality evidence gathered by a group of experts it is one of the highest quality secondary sources. This guideline is endorsed by the National Trainers’ Athletic Association and the American College of Sports Medicine meaning that the information within it has been approved by these organisations. One of the biggest risks of bias in practice guidelines is conflicts of interests of the authors writing it but these are also difficult to identify. Initially, I searched the references of this paper to see if the authors published their own articles and found several authors had published their own works. Of course, this is to be expected as they are experts in the field and as such have likely published many papers in the field. Nevertheless, I noticed Kevin M. Guskiewicz cited is own articles 16 times and the primary author Kimberly G. Harmon cited two of her own articles. I could not identify any conflicts of interest in my search.