It is good to stand on one leg with your eyes shut
To aid concussion research, Marcus Armytage answers the call for former jockeys who know rather a lot about crash landing
I repeated sequences of numbers; I listed all the animals I could in a minute
You know you have arrived at the Institute of Sport, Exercise and Health, in Tottenham Court Road when you wander into an open-plan office and someone, with excellent posture, is tapping away on their laptop while sitting on a Swiss ball.
Granted there were no takers at that particular moment for the workstation on the treadmill, but it set the tone for my day as an object of fascination for the International Concussion and Head Injury Research Foundation based there.
No topic is hotter in sport than concussion and this is Dr Michael Turner’s study into whether retired sports people, starting with former jockeys, are more susceptible to neurodegenerative diseases in later life if they sustained multiple head injuries and concussions in their sporting careers.
By using controls – normal people, of the same age, who did not get concussed – the project aims to come up with a few answers though, of course, it might also come up with more questions.
I am not totally sure where I sit in the doc’s plans because, though I was a jockey who took 100-plus falls in races, I was never actually concussed. A heavy fall, nevertheless, still rattles the brain around and gives you a “subconcussive episode”.
So, in a room, watched by a photograph of one of the great jump jockeys of my era, Adrian Maguire, looking out from a steel halo to support his broken neck, I underwent sessions with Pippa Theo, the doc’s assistant, then a neurologist, a phlebotomist and a neuropsychologist.
I took the baseline concussion test which jockeys are now required to undergo before they are granted a licence to ride – it tests your reaction time to cards being turned over on a computer screen.
I gave generous helpings of blood which will undergo numerous tests. I was more looking forward to the spit test, because I thought it was going to be how far you could gob it, footballer-style. But it was another donation which will be sent off for analysis in a separate project which is looking for biomarkers in saliva which might help them develop an instant pitchside return-to-play concussion test.
I tried to stand on one leg with my eyes closed – are herons taking the Mickey out of us when they sleep on one leg? I repeated sequences of numbers read out to me, then repeated them backwards and then in ascending order. I listed all the animals I could in a minute. The neuropsychologist did not want to know how well I usually did in The Daily Telegraph Saturday generalknowledge crossword – even though I told her. She was after short-term memory stuff so she read out 16 words and then asked me to repeat as many of them as possible.
That was a bit of a recurring nightmare as she did it five times and I never bettered 13. But, as my son pointed out, just be glad she did not ask me to say a sentence without the word “um” in it. After all that, I needed a lie down and I got that when I went to the institute’s MRI scanner for a few brain selfies. It is quite enclosed with a lot of industrial buzzing going on around you.
Between all the experts and the photos, they should have a pretty good idea what is going on in the “backroom” if, indeed, anything is.
Although it has a very serious point, it was as fun as it was interesting and I have never met a bunch of doctors with a better bedside manner. It needs more volunteers from the 60-year-old plus bracket of former jockeys and, like all of us, it could always do with more funding. Otherwise the doc’s project is coming along nicely.