This device is "proven" to protect athletes’ brains. The science is under fire.
Questions about a $200 collar endorsed by NFL players.
As football season gets under way, my latest story is about the Q-Collar, a $200 neck accessory with a reassuring pitch: It’s the only medical device “proven to help protect the brain.” That claim has been authorized by the Food and Drug Administration and endorsed by athletes inside and outside the NFL.
But questions are now being raised about the scientific basis for that claim:
Outside researchers have identified apparent discrepancies and errors in at least a half-dozen studies about the Q-Collar, which has endorsements from more than two dozen professional and college football, soccer, and lacrosse players.
In response, scientists who worked on the studies told The Chronicle that they are planning to fix some of their data. “While these identified errors do not change the overall interpretation of findings,” Gregory D. Myer, a researcher who oversaw many of the papers, said in an email, “we are committed to the highest standards of accuracy in reporting our research findings.”
Still, the data sleuths — Mu Yang, director of a mouse neurobehavioral facility at Columbia University Medical Center, and James Smoliga, a professor of rehabilitation science at Tufts University — are not satisfied. They say that the proposed corrections would address only a fraction of the problems they’ve found in the papers, which were all published in the Journal of Neurotrauma from 2017 to 2022.
Smoliga, a longtime critic of the Q-Collar, said that he supports athletes playing contact sports with a clear understanding of the risks. “The problem with Q-Collar is that Q-Collar is lowering the perception of the risk,” he said, “so now people are not making informed decisions.”
The apparent issues are statistical in nature: identical data for different groups of subjects, different data for seemingly identical subjects, improbable data, omitted data.
“Without a doubt,” Smoliga said, “we can say we can’t trust the data.”
Read the rest of the story here (free to access by logging in through an academic institution, or by making an account with your email).