Table 4.

Concussion assessment and outcome measurements among boxers and martial art fighters in the included studies

Ref.	Study design	Method of assessing concussion and its definition	Measurement of outcome(s)	Prevalence of outcome	Internal comparison	Between sports comparison	External comparison
Bang et al 201625	Case series with external comparison group	Concussion approximated by number of matches fought (bouts) and number of KO Participants had a mean number of bout of 30 (range 23–37) and a mean number of KO of 1.4 (range 0–4)	Neurocognitive tests Neuroimaging Neurological tests Personality tests Mood		−		Boxers performed significantly worse in the delayed recall of visuospatial memory Boxers performed significantly worse in the assembly task of the Purdue Pegboard test (p=0.028) but not in the other tasks
Bernick et al 201542	Cross-sectional study (baseline of a cohort study). with external comparison group	Fight Exposure Score (FES) function of cumulative fights and intensity of exposure26 Mean (range) KO sustained by professional boxers: 0.9 (0–13) Mean (range) KO sustained by professional Martial Art Fighters: 0.6 (0–6)	Neurocognitive tests Neuroimaging		Reduced processing speed in those exposed to more fights (p0.041), worse in boxers than MMA Reduced processing speed in those with a higher FES with (p=0.023) with the effect increasing at high levels of FES (however, the effect was lost when restricting to participants within an impaired range

KO, knock-out; MMA, Mixed Martial Arts.