The star linebacker for the Carolina Panthers, Luke Kuechly, missed the last five games of the 2016 NFL season after he suffered a concussion.
So this season, he’s trying on something new: the Q-Collar, an experimental product developed by Q30 Innovations that has been studied and shown to decrease the risk of brain injury, according to The Charlotte Observer.
The collar is a thin band whose ends press lightly against the jugular vein, decreasing blood flow out of the head, according to a June 2016 news release on the Q-Collar. That blood then cushions the brain from the skull, reducing the overall impact on the brain by providing it with a tighter . Restricting blood flow sounds dangerous on first intuition, but a study done on high school football players revealed no meaningful loss of white matter—which contains the brain’s nerves—in those who wore the Q-Collar.
“These groundbreaking studies show early evidence Q30’s Q-Collar was effective to significantly reduce injury to the brain resulting from sports-related blows to the head,” Q30 Innovations co-founder Tom Hoey said in a statement. “These are important findings that warrant continued research of this potential major advance in reducing the occurrence of brain injuries.”
The device has also been independently reviewed and researched by sports science specialists at Cincinnati Children’s hospital. One doctor, Gregory Myer, directs the research efforts and Human Performance Laboratory in the hospital’s Sports Science division.
“By putting a small ‘kink in the hose,’ you’re creating a backfill,” Myer explained to The Observer. “So that extra blood volume is filling that free space in the cerebral-vascular tree. … We’re just filling up that free expandable space so the brain has less room to move inside the skull.”
The Q-Collar is also vastly different from other devices that help reduce the risk of, or at least help monitor, brain injury in contact sports. Companies like Defend Your Head and Athlete Intelligence have created products like a hard external shell that attaches to football helmets and a sensor that can detect impacts to the head. Instead, the Q-Collar taps into human biology to form a natural protective layer around the brain.
“Adding more weight and more mass (around the outside) doesn’t make a lot of sense from a physics standpoint to help protect the brain on the inside,” Myer told The Observer. “(But) coming at it with the idea of providing an airbag for the brain seemed like a novel approach.”
According to The Observer, Kuechly is the first NFL player to try the Q-Collar, and he does his best to keep it out of mind and view. He confirmed to the newspaper that he wears the device, but refused to say anything else.
