American doctors discovered an unusual brain malformation in a teenage football player who had endured months of symptoms after a concussion, reports CBS News.
Logan Coleridge was used to taking hits in football. He’d been playing since he was six-years-old and had had several concussions. But after a helmet-to-helmet impact during his first year of high school in August 2023, he started having debilitating symptoms.
The New Jersey teen said he was very dizzy and had trouble balancing. His memory was “terrible”, and he had a severe light sensitivity, he said, along with terrible headaches. Previously a strong student, he now struggled to focus in the classroom and couldn’t remember school assignments or what he read in class.
“I’ve had concussions in my past, but this wasn’t like a normal one,” Logan said. “I knew it was something else.”
More alarmingly, Logan wasn’t getting better. Several months of physical therapy had no effect, said Becky Coleridge, his mother. A neurologist who had been treating Logan since his diagnosis with abdominal migraines the year before prescribed two medications, both of which had negative side effects.
An orthopoedic surgeon suggested looking at his neck. Other practitioners had no answers. Coleridge wanted doctors to prescribe an MRI, but wasn’t able to get one. Meanwhile, Logan was missing school almost every week. Over-the-counter medications couldn’t dull the headaches, and they were becoming more frequent.
In early 2024, Logan was able to see a concussion specialist after a particularly bad headache kept him from going to school.
“The first thing he said was ‘Nobody’s given this kid an MRI?’” his mother remembered. The specialist prescribed the scan, as well as an X-ray of Logan’s neck. The Coleridges thought the scans might show Logan had an issue with his occipital nerve, which runs from the neck to the scalp.
The results were much harder to hear: Logan was diagnosed with an arteriovenous malformation, or AVM. It was a condition that he and his parents had never heard of before.
“Everything we read was very scary,” Becky Coleridge said. “At that moment, we realised the danger he had been in.”
Pressure and rupture
An AVM is an abnormal tangle of blood vessels in the brain, said Dr Andrew Russman, head of the Cleveland Clinic’s stroke programme, who was not involved in Logan’s care.
“AVMs put a lot of pressure on the vein side and can produce a variety of symptoms,” he said. The biggest risk with an AVM is rupture, where the vessels burst and cause bleeding in the brain.
In a case like Logan’s, where the AVM hasn’t ruptured, there can still be symptoms. Those symptoms can affect a person’s motor skills, sensory and visual perception, language abilities and the way they walk, Russman said. The effects can vary depending on where in the brain the AVM has formed.
The Coleridges had two options to treat Logan: radiation therapy, a non-invasive technique that uses focused radiation beams to target and slowly destroy the AVM, or surgery.
Radiation therapy could take too long, the family decided, and so they decided to have Logan treated by Dr Howard Riina, a cerebrovascular neurosurgeon at NYU Langone.
Riina said the AVM, which was on a “headache spot” in the occipital region of the brain, was probablt the root of Logan’s symptoms.
People are born with AVMs, Riina said, and they grow as the body grows, which can cause increased symptoms.
“Obviously, you don’t want to have multiple things going on in your head, but the concussion is what led to the imaging, which led to the diagnosis of the AVM, which was probably what was causing the headaches all along,” he said.
Raising awareness
Logan underwent surgery on 17 July last year, nearly a year after his symptoms began. Riina performed a craniotomy and removed the AVM.
Three days later, Logan was discharged from the hospital to continue his recovery at home.
“I couldn’t really do the things I love normally doing, like exercising… playing football was a big thing for me. I was just stuck in bed, with minimal activity,” he said.
Now, Logan has only the occasional headache, and the pain can be treated with medication. He has follow-ups at NYU Langone, but Riina said everything has come back clear.
The Coleridges are working to encourage early testing: Becky Coleridge said she wishes Logan had received an MRI earlier so that months of suffering and confusion could have been avoided.
This month, her son is gearing up for a return to the football field.
See more from MedicalBrief:
First Gamma Knife Icon Centre established in southern Africa