Teen's Concussion Leads to Death

Nathan Stiles was 17 and was a straight-A senior and the start running back for the Spring Hill, Kansas, High School Broncos'. He also was a starter for the basketball team and he was active in his church. The final game of the season his senior year turned out to be the final game of his life. He died of second-impact syndrome, which is the result of the brain getting hit before it has the chance to heal from the initial concussion. He is the youngest person with a reported case of chronic traumatic encephalopathy which is a degenerative disease found in football player and other athletes in contact sports who get repeated blows to the head. In the first half of his final game he got an interception which he brought all the way back for a touchdown. His parents described it as completely graceful. But when halftime came, his mother saw that he was walking off the field oddly. Shortly after she received a phone call telling her to rush down to the bench. Before they could even make it down to the field, he had collapsed. She tried yelling for him to wake up but went into a seizure. He was airlifted to Kansas State University Medical Center. They were able to stop the bleeding in the brain after four hours of surgery, but by that time the heart and lungs were too weak to go on. By 4 a.m. that morning they took him off of life support. They asked to use his brain to decipher the cause of death. From the findings, they are urging patients to wait until full recovery from a concussion so that way no one will have to suffer from what Nathan Stiles will never be able to do because he didn't wait until he was completely symptom free.
http://www.cnn.com/2012/01/27/health/big-hits-broken-dreams-brain-bank/index.html?hpt=hp_c2