During this weekend’s Super Bowl, New England Patriots offensive lineman Jared Wilson will wear a Guardian Cap, a helmet cover designed to blunt head impacts. But conflicting claims by the NFL and Guardian Sports bring the benefit of the caps into question, according to a recent article by Ken Belson for The New York Times.

A recent study in the British Journal of Sports Medicine found that Guardian Caps (GCs), an add-on padded “shell device” that goes atop a helmet, do not reduce the risk of sport-related concussions (SRCs) in high school football players.

While brain injury prevention in sports has largely focused on concussions, a groundbreaking study revealed that the development and severity of CTE are associated with the duration of play and the cumulative force of all repetitive head impacts.

In a study researchers found that after a single collegiate football game, which involves repetitive head hits (RHHs), changes to glial fibrillary acidic protein (GFAP) correlated with head impact exposure and reduced brain white matter integrity in 30 football players two days later.

A team of experts argues that the term “subconcussive” should be replaced by the term “non-concussive” when referring to head impacts.

A retrospective cohort study by Jacob Jo et al. revealed that sport-related concussions occurring during the early third of the season exhibited a quicker resolution of symptoms than those occurring in the later third of the season, although this finding did not remain statistically significant in a multivariate analysis.

A cross-sectional study published in JAMA Network Open found that participation in organized American football was associated with higher rates of reported parkinsonism or Parkinson’s disease diagnosis.

Is the Q-Collar effective at concussion prevention, and is it safe? The FDA summary states that the Q-Collar was not approved to prevent concussions and there are some risks to the device.

A study found that former college football players are at “increased risk for degenerative brain diseases,” and reported cognitive impairment diagnoses, recurrent headaches, and cardiovascular disease at higher rates than an age-matched control group.

Mark Patrick Pankow et al. conducted the first-ever systematic review and meta-analysis of “incidence rates, risk factors, and prevention of concussion and head impacts” in youth tackle football. Their review, published in Sports Medicine, was “also the first to produce a pooled estimate of concussion incidence rate by session type in football (i.e., games, practices).”

Part of Harvard’s Football Players Health Study found an association between concussions suffered while playing in the NFL and low testosterone and erectile dysfunction later in life. Head trauma injuries to the pituitary gland likely cause low testosterone levels, and the authors believe that the results have implications for everyone who has experienced a head injury.

In a study published in Annals of Neurology, authors Jesse Mez et al. examined the brains of deceased athletes for evidence of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) and found that the risk of CTE approximately doubled for every 2.6 years spent playing American football.