As fans and players alike gear up for Super Bowl XLV this Sunday in Arlington, Texas where the Green Bay Packers will face off against the Pittsburgh Steelers, Mike Oliver, the executive director of the National Operating Committee on Sports Athletic Equipment (NOCSAE), wants to make one "fundamental fact" very clear. "No football helmet can prevent all concussions," he says.

In a press release today, NOCSAE urges parents and athletes to "get the facts right about football helmets and concussion protection." NOCSAE, an independent and non-profit standard-setting body, has developed sophisticated performance and standard tests for football helmets and facemasks, as well as other sports, and is a leader in scientific research to understand concussions and head injury.

Oliver spoke in length with Technology Review yesterday, and said, "any claim that is made with regard to concussions that is not based in fact or science is potentially very damaging." Tom Udall (D-New Mexico) is asking the U.S. Federal Trade Commission to investigate "misleading safety claims and deceptive practices" in the selling of new football helmets and reconditioned used ones. Oliver says he has talked with Udall and is encouraging the investigation. The difficulty, he explains, is that in the last five to eight years helmet designs have changed but performance has not. "Companies can promote their helmets as being better for reducing concussions, but we know from the test data that all the helmets [on the market] are nearly identical [in performance]."

Oliver adds that while it is fair for the companies to say that the helmet addresses concussions at some level, the problem is scientist don't know how much they actually need to reduce the accelerations of the head to reduce concussions. "There is a lot about concussions and head injury that researchers don't fully understand," said Joseph Maroon, a professor of neurosurgery at the University of Pennsylvania Medical Center and the team neurosurgeon for the Pittsburgh Steelers, in a recent interview with Technology Review.

In the last decade the most significant finding in concussion research, says Oliver, is identifying that head injury is caused not just by linear accelerations, movement of the head back and forth in a straight line, but rotational acceleration, which causes the head to rotate or twist. "The brain is very sensitive to torque, some scientists think this also causes tension between the brain and brain stem," says Oliver.

The next step is to be able to define thresholds for rotational force. Current NOCSAE helmet safety tests only test for side and front impacts (below, bottom video), and linear accelerations (below, top video).

NOCSAE recently awarded three grants to study concussions: one for a project to better model the brain; another for a study to improve testing protocols; and the last to study rotational acceleration. Also, Riddell, a sports equipment manufacturing, and owner of the HIT technology--a system that employs sensor-equipped helmets to measure the location, magnitude, and direction of hits experienced during a game or practice--is working with researchers and the NFL to build new sensors that can better analyze hits. The NFL plans to use the system to study impacts in the 2011 football season.

Concussions in football is a "complex issue," says Oliver, and "it won't be until we can really understand the injury that we can build better helmet technology." He's confident that will happen, soon.

On Sunday the National Football League holds its championship game, Super Bowl XLIV. It will be the first Super Bowl since the league acknowledged the link between mild head trauma--often caused by the game's rough style of play--and long-term brain damage, and overhauled its policies toward concussions. As many football fans may have noticed, players this season were more likely to remain on the bench than return to the field after a blow to the head, thanks to new rules forbidding them from playing after showing significant signs of concussion.

That change has been a long time coming, writes Deborah Blum in an Op-Ed today in The New York Times. While brain injury in football players has seen a growing emphasis in recent years--both in the media and in Congress--strong evidence for the link has been around for more than 80 years. In the piece, Blum describes a paper published in The Journal of the American Medical Association on October 13, 1928. "This raises the question--at least for me--as to why we are announcing the athlete concussion-dementia link as a new, and still somewhat debatable, issue some 80 years later," she writes.

In that study, performed by Dr. Harrison Martland, chief medical examiner in Essex, NJ,

Martland did autopsies on more than 300 people who had died of head injuries, looking for patterns of brain damage. For his study of boxers, he talked a fight promoter into giving him a list of 23 former fighters he thought could be labeled as definitely punch drunk. Martland was able to track down only 10 of the former athletes, but in those cases, he found the promoter's diagnosis was on target. Four were in asylums, suffering from dementia. Two had difficulty forming sentences or responding to questions. One was almost blind, two had trouble walking and one had developed symptoms similar to those of Parkinson's disease.

More recently,

Surveys done in the last few years have found that N.F.L. players are at higher risk of dementias and other mental disorders than the general population. Autopsies of athletes -- notably the brains of former N.F.L. players who suffered from profound dementias -- consistently found dark clusters of nerve cell proteins, formations more common to elderly Alzheimer's patients. Similar patterns of damage were recently reported in wrestlers and soccer players. Most of these athletes were dead by age 50."

...At a Congressional hearing on football brain injuries, held in Houston on Monday, legislators accused college athletic officials of ignoring risks and failing to adopt polices that sufficiently protected young players. "It's money, money, money," said Representative Steve Cohen, a Tennessee Democrat, "and health care ought to be considered."

Researchers are working hard to develop better ways to study the problem, including helmets designed to detect concussions, which would alert players or coaches when they need to be benched, or even prevent them. And new ways to study mild traumatic brain injury, which doesn't show up in traditional brain scans.