It doesn't really seem necessary to say this but slap fighting is not one of those sports that has a lot of healthful side effects. It's growing quite a following anyway, with millions watching slapping matches on YouTube.
Researchers at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine decided to take a closer look and pubished their findings in JAMA Surgery this week.
In a nutshell, they don't like it.
“Slap fighting may be entertaining to watch as a lay viewer, but, as medical professionals, we found some aspects of the competitions to be quite concerning,” said Raj Swaroop Lavadi, postdoctoral research fellow at Pitt’s neurosurgery department.
“Our end goal is to make all professional sports safer for the neurologic health of the athletes. It is really difficult to ban any sport, but it is possible to raise awareness about the associated harms. We were intrigued with the prospect of applying video analysis to identify signs of concussion in a competition that hasn’t previously been studied,” Lavadi said in a news release.
Slap fighting is just what it sounds like. The competitors, separated by a waist-level podium, stand across from each other and take turns to deliver crushing open-handed blows across the opponent’s face. According to the official rules, opponents have a few moments to recover, and the fight continues until one of the participants gets knocked out – or until the judges decide the winner.
The medical community has expressed serious concerns about potential dangers to the participants from head injury and brain trauma, but, until now, no peer-reviewed study attempted to record and quantify the risks.
333 slaps analyzed
To assess how dangerous professional slap fighting can be, trained reviewers watched videos of slap fighting competitions and analyzed 333 slaps. They recorded visible signs of concussions – ranging from diminished awareness to complete loss of responsiveness – and analyzed how often those events occurred.
According to the analysis, more than half of the slap sequences resulted in participants exhibiting visible signs of concussion. By the end of their matches, nearly 40% of sequences resulted in signs of poor motor coordination, about a third of the sequences resulted in participants having a blank and vacant look, and a quarter of the sequences featured participants that were slow to get up after being brought down by a blow.
Nearly 80% of the fighters demonstrated a visible sign of concussion at least once in the series of matches.
The results paint a worrisome picture for the participants’ long-term well-being.
“Clinically, concussion can show up in different ways, but each can result in short or long-term disability and socioeconomic distress,” said senior author Nitin Agarwal, M.D., associate professor of neurosurgery at Pitt. “As a physician who has a background in martial arts and is passionate about combat sports, I remain concerned regarding the frequency of overt signs of concussion among slap fighters.”
The team is now working to measure and analyze the physical impact of an average slap using mouthpieces similar to those used by professional football players.