Q-Collar is Minimizing TBIs in Professional & Youth Contact Sports

[Dr. Dana Dunleavy]
Why don't I ship back to Taylor and say what was athletics like for you growing up and when did you think about utilizing Q-Collar and have you had any head injuries yourself?

[Taylor Rapp]
Yes, I've played sports my whole life growing up. I had an older brother, very sports-centric family. We both played baseball and football growing up, kind of early on played all sports, but as we grew older, narrowed it down to baseball and football, and just took off of football. Baseball was actually my first love, ended up giving it up and then trying to focus on football, ended up getting recruited, playing in college, and then here I am now.

I actually started wearing the Q-Collar first the first season was all last season, I did suffer a brain injury two years ago when the Rams won Super Bowl 2021, I had a pretty bad concussion and my agent actually, he actually heard about the Q-Collar and he just showed me it, forwarded me along and told me all about it and just all off season just did a little more research I guess, a little more playing around with it. I actually bought one, just wearing it around trying to see if I can wear it during the season and ended up wearing it all last season and I still wear it now.

I can't go out there on the football field without wearing the collar. It's basically like a helmet to me now. I can't walk out of the locker room to go out to the practice field without my collar.

[Dr. Dana Dunleavy]
Yes, and so that gets us to some of the common questions as myself when I was 10 years old and we started wearing helmets and ski racing, I was hazed pretty heavily at that time. Now you couldn't imagine a kid in a ski race without a helmet or even on the slopes. Any difficulty in terms of when you got started, people giving you trouble for it?

[Taylor Rapp]
No, not at all. I would actually say more so on the flip side, guys are always weird about their style and swag, and more so people asking me like, "Hey, what's that thing around your neck. That thing looks cool. What does it do?" or stuff like that. I would say probably more so on that side, the positive side rather than the negative side.

[Dr. Dana Dunleavy]
Fantastic. As you noted, it's a synergistic relationship between you and your agent. Wayne's spoken about that before, what is the cost, for instance, of a military warrior and both high-level athletes and the military, the worst thing that could happen is an injury. Anything you want to address with that, Wayne?

[Dr. Wayne Olan]
Yes. At the end of the day, that's where the birth of the collar comes from. Collar is a military device. It was born in the military. It was developed by a military physician, and it was developed to protect our war fighters, Special Forces, protect our war fighters. Taylor does it every day. He's doing the same thing every day. It was a synergistic movement into sports as you got into some of the sports where head injuries are much more prevalent or even much more assumed.

You have a lot of sports now including like your ski racing and sliding and NASCAR driving where people utilizing the collar and finding the benefit there as well not just from this the one on-head injury but from vibration and other things where you can minimize brain movement. Clearly, this thing was born on the battlefield and it has found its way onto the football field, which is essentially a natural progression.

[Dr. Dana Dunleavy]
We'll get a little nerdy here. Can you teach us a little bit about functional MRI or DTI?

[Dr. Wayne Olan]
Yes, so we can teach a little bit about that. That's where the study was. You got to, eventually, you have to look at something and prove its value, right? You can't just say, "Hey, put this on, it looks like a good idea." That's where the study was done, using DTI imaging. What you did is look for white matter lesions. You had to also find a group of athletes that in theory or you hope probably don't have any. That's why the studies were centered in high school athletes.

You basically have 500 athletes, half wear a collar, half don't. You all got MRIs before the season, all got MRIs after the season. They even had MRIs carried out for two to three years out after. This was done at St. Xavier High School in Cincinnati, Cincinnati Children's Hospital. 70% of the athletes who wore the collar, this number is striking, right? 77% of athletes who wore the collar had no changes. You understand this statement of a shear injury, where your gray and your white matter come together. That's where the brain is almost the most susceptible to motion injury, shear injuries where it could turn and it could tear, because those two portions of the brain are anchored differently and they will accelerate differently when the brain is either accelerating or decelerating.

70% of the athletes at the end of the year had no changes who were wearing the collar. If you weren't wearing the collar, these are high school athletes now, remember, this isn't college or professional. 73% of those athletes had gray-white shearing injuries that they didn't have at the beginning of the year. That's a striking number if it's your child. That was where the birth of it came from. Obviously, a lot of animal studies and stuff like that before, but at the end of the day, when you see a number like that with a device that carries no risk, hard to discount that data on a sample size that large.

[Dr. Dana Dunleavy]
Yes, and I think, let's switch to that, the no risk. I think Taylor was alluding to that a little bit, but it was even studied, right, of looking at people's cognitive ability, visual acuity. Taylor, sounds like you did your own testing, so to speak, as well, right, to see how you felt before and after wearing it at home, wearing it at training?

[Taylor Rapp]
Yes, definitely. I would say one of the biggest effects and change that I felt wearing it all last season and then wearing it all this season, as well, is how well I feel after I play a game or after I have a practice that I wear with contact. In previous years, without wearing the collar, like you'd make a couple tackles and, I mean these-- football is like every tackle is like a car crash.

Before I started wearing the collar, your neck would get so sore the day after a game or practice where you had contact, your shoulders, your traps, everything. Ever since I started wearing the collar, I noticed one huge change in how I felt the next day, the next morning after the game or after contact training camp practice where we had a lot of contact and stuff like that. That's been the biggest change and I feel great the next morning, next day.

[Dr. Dana Dunleavy]
That's fantastic. Wayne, do you want to speak to a little bit how they studied that specifically?

[Dr. Wayne Olan]
Well, that aspect is when you look at studies-wise is really in the works, right? Because the studies that got the FDA clearance were based on games. The military now, and we just got a $3 million grant through the military and doing some much longer range studies for much longer wears than just an NFL game or a college game or high school game. They have to evaluate stuff. If you have a sharpshooter, he's a Navy SEAL or he's a Delta Force Warrior, at the end of a 12-hour shift, he has to fill out an evaluation form. There's no doubt that we're seeing that military fighters are testing as good as they did at the end of a shift as they did earlier in the shift, which is a huge change to the guys who aren't wearing the collar. That's anecdotal right now, but it will at one point become part of the literature, that's for sure.

[Dr. Dana Dunleavy]
Maybe you could address on another level then would say, so why does this work, right? You use your woodpecker analogy and why is that not a problem?

[Dr. Wayne Olan]
Okay, well, first and foremost, it works by basically, and the idea behind it is to stabilize the brain inside your skull. How do you do that? If you increase the size of your veins, which are between the brain and the skull, not deep inside, you can then minimize the movement. The best analogy is almost like putting on a seatbelt, right? You now basically put a seatbelt on your brain so you can't move inside your skull when your brain, your body, your skull, everything accelerates and decelerates at very high velocities. That's all it does.

The reason why it's not significant clinically just to wear it, because it's not an occlusion. It's just a 30% diminished in venous return. It's one and a half pounds of pressure. It's exactly the same pressure as wearing a necktie. If Taylor's at a game during church and the game breaks out, he's protected. It's the same exact thing. Basically, all you're doing is kinking. You're not occluding, and that's very important because people like to mischaracterize that. You're not occluding the jugular vein. You're just kinking it a little bit and slowing the blood out. It's not more than a teaspoon or a couple of teaspoons of blood that it takes.

We have MRIs that show the different size of your venous sinuses, the collar on and the collar off. It's not subtle. Basically, that's what it does. It holds your brain steady inside of your skull. That's why you think about vibrations or anything like that. Or if you're a NASCAR driver, you're making left turns, 200 miles an hour, where your brain's getting pushed against one side of your skull the entire race. There may be a benefit there as well. Your brain is held a little tighter on the inside. It's been shown in nature as well to be helpful. It seems like it's starting to pan out here. We're just trying to spread the word.

[Dr. Dana Dunleavy]
Then, Taylor, maybe you could just go back to some big hits. We know you make some big tackles and another guy like you, right? Rodney Harrison has talked about some of the long-term impacts for him in terms of head injuries. Do you talk to him or others that have suffered long term with the game?

[Taylor Rapp]
I mean, no, I haven't. I haven't talked to Rodney. I've briefly spoke to Luke Kuechly. I know he was a big forefront guy, proponent, that started and launched to launch this whole collar. Like you said, at the end of the day, football is football. I'm not going to change the way I play. Hopefully, like Wayne touched on, hopefully we can change or, no, make things safer within the game. We're not going to change how the game's played, change the rules or anything like that.

Just like with everything, I'm going to do everything I can. I'm big in terms of doing everything I can. The 1%, I'm doing everything right. This is one big thing that I'll continue to keep doing. It's kept me safe for the last two years. Sometimes it can be a violent game. Like I said, every tackle seems like a car crash. Just to have the peace of mind of having the collar to give me that extra protection, that extra peace of mind to play free and play the game the way the game's meant to be played is it means everything.

[Dr. Wayne Olan]
When you hear someone like him say it, too, and I know him. He puts so much effort into recovery. He puts so much effort into what he eats, how he trains, right? Why wouldn't you do whatever you could to protect yourself as well without having to change anything? He doesn't notice it. He doesn't feel it, but he's doing everything he can to make sure he's on that field for as long as he can play.

[Dr. Dana Dunleavy]
Yes. Thinking long term on that, too, there's been various discussions about, NFL players and opioid use and various other techniques to handle pain after the games coming up soon. a colleague of mine that started it's called the MATTERS organization to reduce opioid overdoses. CNN's coming to town to do an interview about that because it's been so successful in New York to reduce hospitalizations and again, complications with medications. Have either of you can take this one, discuss that this plays a role at all in the long term impact of reducing systemic medications?

[Dr. Wayne Olan]
If you think about what we're trying-- repetitive head injury, right? That's what you're trying to-- so you're talking about headaches, talking about the long-term effects, most of that, in theory, there's going to be a whole different set of issues, as well as risk and as well as outcomes. We're trying to keep guys like him, their cognition stable and uniform throughout his life. He's a young kid right now, but he's got life after this, right? He's going to have a family. He's going to have a wife. He's going to have kids. He wants to play around with them. He wants to get on the ground or roll around with them and do all that stuff and be able to be the husband and be the father that he dreamed of being. I think whether the medications or whatever will be involved in it, I think this, it gives him the best opportunity to play the career that he dreamed about without it stopping, but then going out to live the life that he's dreaming about as well that his career is going to enable him to do.

[Dr. Dana Dunleavy]
Taylor, anything on that, whether be you personally or other guys that are dealing with chronic pain or headaches?

[Taylor Rapp]
Yes. Wayne touched on it, just having the peace of mind of just wearing the collar and having the peace of mind of doing everything I can to ensure that future that Wayne is talking about, that my future kids that I'll be a big part in their lives and be the husband that I've always dreamed of being like Wayne said. Because like you said, there's life after football, this football, this game is such a short period of life. I'll still have three quarters of my life after I'm done playing. Just knowing that I'm doing everything I can by wearing the collar, it just gives me that extra peace of mind. I hopefully won't have to go down that path that you talked about with medications, opioids, all that.

[Dr. Dana Dunleavy]
Sounds great. I think, why don't we give you guys each opportunity for closing remarks? What you think this could have as an impact both for friends, colleagues, and kids growing up?

[Dr. Wayne Olan]
Well, I'll start because I think his statement is going to be more powerful at the end, but at the end of the day, this is about protecting yourself, but being part of protecting the legacy and watching guys be able to go out and do-- kids, forget the sport, it's not just about football, it's not just about lacrosse, not about hockey, soccer. I think you're finding that the uses for this are much, much greater than people even imagined.

Then on top of that, one of the hugest privileges we have is protecting our warfighters, to know that we're doing something to protect the guys who are protecting us, you can't even put a price or a pride level on that. You get to see it play out on Sundays, but you don't know about the guy who's dug in a foxhole or sitting up in a stand somewhere and he's out the one out protecting us when we're not watching.

I think the opportunity to do something like this is such a privilege for me and to watch Taylor go out and do his thing every Sunday to the level that he does it, and knowing that at night he can go home and he doesn't have to shake it off, so to speak, and he's not getting his belt wrong, he can be the kid, be the player, be the man he wants to be, I can't even describe the privileges for me to be part of this.

[Taylor Rapp]
Yes. Like Wayne said, it's all about the future. Like you said at the start of this, I'm not getting paid to do this. It's all about spreading the word and trying to get the word out about this thing because I think it's so powerful. I think it can, this is drastic, but I think it could change the world and everything, not only sports, like Wayne said. I think it just, the potential it has to change everything, change all these games, change the youth, change everything. I think it's all about the future.

Like Wayne said, it means the world to me, for me to be able to speak on it and being a guy that has worn it and been through it, had a severe brain injury two years ago and ever since never played a game without the collar and how much of it's an essential piece of equipment for me now. I think it means the world to me that I can speak on it and hopefully spread the word to everyone and try to get this thing out there as much as possible.

[Dr. Dana Dunleavy]
Beautiful. Love it. Again, we're extremely grateful to have you in this town, and I think you've seen the mafias out there in the rain and the snow and at the airport waiting when your flights are delayed. Even whether it's an injury on the Bills or whether there's something related to the Bills on a team somewhere else, that the support is pretty strong. I know that they're all thankful to see you and listen to you and look forward to watching you at the next game.

[Taylor Rapp]: Appreciate it, man. Thanks for having me on.