![]() Instead of trying to ban the sport, he said, physicians should devise ways to stop fights before they get out of hand and thereby reduce the injuries-and sometimes the deaths-that are visited upon boxers."There's no greater moment than this" - Canelo Alvarez, on defending his titles against John Ryder LAPRESSE "But I don't think it's going to happen."Įven if there were a ban, Miele argued, many fighters would still box illegally. "It would be healthier for everybody if it were banned," Miele said. Some groups, like the Journal of the American Medical Association, the American Neurological Association, and the Canadian and Australian Medical Associations have called for a complete ban on boxing. "The diehards, the purists would not like it," Miele said. Some boxing fans would not support cutting matches short, he added, believing that fighters tough enough to continue after repeated blows should be allowed to make the decision themselves. Amateur and Olympic boxing matches are more likely to use methods to cut matches short because they place more emphasis on safety than professional matches, which have fewer standard rules, Miele said. To test this, he plans to put tiny accelerometers in boxers' mouthpieces to judge just how hard a boxer has been hit.Įventually Miele wants accelerometers to be used in all boxing matches, allowing physicians to monitor them from ringside and stop a match when the force of a blow becomes too great. Understanding how the force of blows thrown in a match relates to the chance of fatality is the next key step in developing a method to prevent boxing fatalaties, Miele said. The results of the study were published in the February issue of Neurosurgery. The study "objectifies some of the things we already knew," Miele said. "There was a huge difference," Miele said.īut when they compared fatal matches to "classic," or well-known, highly competitive matches, the classic bouts had 10 more punches landed per round on average, indicating that the number of punches isn't the only factor involved in fatalities. They found that the number of punches thrown was significantly higher for fatal matches, with 26.6 punches landed per round (a professional match lasts no more than 12 rounds) for the survivor, 22.9 for the fighter who died and only 9.4 in an average match. ![]() To see if fatalities could be linked to the number of punches thrown in a match, Miele and his colleagues had expert observers review tapes for fatal and "average" boxing matches and count the number of punches thrown and landed with a computerized system called Punchstat. But because Scottland won the next two rounds, the match continued until Scottland was knocked out in the 10th round. In the Scottland-Jones match, Scottland took a flurry of punches in the seventh round, prompting a physician to warn the official to call the match off if Scottland sustained many more hits. Miele, who also works as a ringside physician, said that when he reviewed tapes of fatal matches, he saw several warning signs that physicians and officials should have caught. In a boxing match, such as the one set between Shane Mosley and Luis Collazo in Las Vegas for Saturday, each fighter has a dedicated official observer and ringside physician who watches for signs that the fighter has reached his punishment limit, but these judgments are subjective and can be hard to spot in the heat of the match, Miele said. A subdural hematoma that put Scottland in a coma ultimately led to his death. The two main causes of death from boxing injuries are the subdural hematoma, a rupturing of the veins between the brain and the skull, and cerebral edema, a buildup of water in the brain. He knows of boxers who are only 30 years old, but are unable to speak because "they've taken too many punches," he said. "You're not supposed to get punched in the head every day for five years," Miele said. ![]() But it is one of most dangerous in terms of chronic injury, or injuries accumulated over the boxer's career, he added. In terms of acute injury, or damage sustained by one punch or in one match, boxing is actually one of the safer sports, Miele said. "Any time you get hit in the head, there's brain damage," Miele told LiveScience. Boxing has some of the same injury risks as other sports, but because the main target areas of punches are the chest and head, boxers are at high risk for brain injuries. ![]()
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