This article deploys a qualitative media content analysis to examine discourses linking sport, head injury, and longer term neurocognitive decline. It draws on a seminal British television documentary and associated print media coverage to demonstrate that the representation of sport-related brain injury is intricately connected to both conceptions of risk in sport and a wider social response to aging and dementia. The article augments existing North American analyses to provide the first cross-cultural comparison of this phenomenon and, in doing so, illustrates how the social prominence of cultural representations of sport-related brain injury relates in part to the distinct characteristics of the sport-related phenomenon, which extend and amplify both the broader cultural crisis of concussion in sport and existing representations of dementia. The study is therefore important because it provides a unique perspective on both a key contemporary sporting issue and this global health concern.

本文部署了定性媒体内容分析，以研究将运动，头部受伤和长期神经认知功能下降联系在一起的话语。它借鉴了具有开创性的英国电视纪录片和相关的平面媒体报道，证明与运动有关的脑损伤的表现与运动中的风险概念以及对衰老和痴呆症的更广泛的社会反应都息息相关。这篇文章对北美现有的分析进行了补充，以提供这种现象的首次跨文化比较，并在此过程中说明了与运动相关的脑损伤的文化表征在社会上的突出地位在某种程度上与与运动相关的脑损伤的独特特征有关。这种现象不仅扩大和扩大了脑震荡的更广泛的文化危机，也扩大了现有的痴呆症表现形式。