SUCCESS

Sustainable careers in elite contact sports (SUCCESS) promotes a safe and long sports career, cognitive health, and wellbeing of athletes. Contact sports involve actions that pose risk to brain health, such as collisions in ice hockey and headers in football. SUCCESS studies the consequences of head impacts at different career stages from youth to elite stages into the post-career phase. We identify risk factors for head injuries and prevalence of head impacts in women's ice-hockey and football. We examine the short- and long-term outcome of head impacts and how they affect sporting careers. We use methods such as head tracking sensors, GPS, and video-footage, self-reports, interviews, cognitive measures, and brain imaging. SUCCESS offers novel knowledge about consequences of head impacts on brain health. The project is carried out by researchers in the universities of Helsinki and Jyväskylä in collaboration with sports organizations.

2024

2027