In the sports injury literature, there is a huge discrepancy in the amount of research done in assigned male at birth (AMAB) compared to assigned female at birth (AFAB) athletes, and this discrepancy is even more so seen in concussion research. In recent years, we have begun to see trends showing that AFABs experience concussion differently than AMABs. In this post, I’m going to talk about what we know so far from the literature, why we may be seeing these results, and where we need to go from here.

Occurrence Concussion occurrence is consistently higher in AFABs than AMABs across several age and sport categories. In sports such as basketball, where the amount of contact is similar in both male and female iterations of the sport, AFABs show a higher occurrence of concussion; but also, in sports such as ice hockey, where females have significantly less collisions and contact compared to their male counterparts, we STILL see a higher occurrence of concussion. While we cannot say for certain why this happens, there are a few theories that have been proposed: Smaller head to neck ratio As we went over in my first blog post about concussions, concussions are caused by an acceleration or deceleration force to the brain. AFAB’s necks are generally thinner and weaker than AMAB’s, and therefore, are less able to control the movement of the head via the neck when an impact occurs. More force is then delivered to the head and brai...