Health Experts Weigh in on Tua Tagovailoa’s Scary Hit During the Dolphins-Bills Game

MIAMI DOLPHINS QUARTERBACK Tua Tagovailoa suffered a concussion on Thursday night after a clean hit from Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin. After the pair collided, Tagovailoa fell to the ground and his arms tensed up into what’s known as the “fencing response“—a reflex that causes the arms and fingers to tighten after a head injury. Medical staff attended to the quarterback, and he was able to walk off the field. This is Tagovailoa’s third reported concussion since his start in the NFL in 2020.

“When you have posturing with his arm the way that he did, that’s suspicion for maybe a seizure or loss of consciousness, and that usually is on the severe side,” Shae Datta, M.D., neurologist and co-director of the NYU Langone Concussion Center, tells Men’s Health. The team has yet to report on the severity of the situation.

Additionally, repeated head injuries can cause lots of long-term problems, including memory loss, chronic headaches, mental health issues, difficulty concentrating and focusing, physical impairments, heightened risk of dementia, and chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), according to the National Institute of Health. The risk for sustaining another concussion also increases when a person has had multiple concussions.

“The more concussions or traumatic brain injuries a person sustains, the more incremental effects each of those injuries can have on subsequent [brain] function,” says Kristen Dams-O’Connor, Ph.D., director of the Brain Injury Resource Center at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York. “So in a game like football, the slightest reduction in reaction time can be the difference between a blow to the head that wasn’t quite severe enough to result in a concussion and one that is.”

Repeated injury can also cause the time it takes to recovery from concussion to increase, too, especially if a previous concussion has not fully healed at the time of impact of the next. “Every injury is a small ‘chink in the armor’ so to speak,” says Thomas Bottiglieri, D.O., sports medicine physician at NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia University Irving Medical Center.

The ability for the body to fully heal can be impacted with more injuries. So, not only does the healing process become slower, but healing itself can become less complete—meaning symptoms will keep persisting.

“We expect most people to recover completely from a concussion within days or weeks,” says Dams-O’Connor. “[For] some, it affects them for the rest of their lives, but most people recover completely from one. Fewer recover completely after two [concussions], though, and once you start adding up more, the likelihood of complete recovery goes down.”

Reactions from NFL fans and league insiders have been flooding the internet—providing Tagovailoa with well-wishes, and some even encouraging him to retire after this series of injuries for the sake of himself and his family.

“I’m just worried about the human being,” head coach Mike McDaniel said during a press conference. There has been no further updates on Tagovailoa’s health since then, and it is unclear how long he is expected to be out for.