Objective Sport concussion (SC) subtypes have been purported to associate with length of recovery following injury. However, limited research supports this statement. We hypothesized SC-subtype groups, which were established within 72 hours of injury would not differ in the number of days until symptom-free (SRA) following injury in collegiate athletes. Our secondary hypothesis was that the proportion of collegiate athletes who recovered beyond 14 days would be similar between SC-subtype groups.

Design Cross sectional.

Setting Collegiate athletic training clinic.

Participants Seventy-seven Division 1 collegiate athletes (52 male, 25 female) with an average age of 20.3 ± 1.3 years; who were diagnosed with a SC.

Interventions (or Assessment of Risk Factors) Participants were assigned to cognitive, headache/migraine, ocular, vestibular, mood, sleep, and cervical SC-subtype groups based on symptom type and severity as recorded by the Revised Head Injury Scale within 72 hours of a diagnosed SC.

Outcome Measures A one-way analysis of variance was used to compare groups based the number of days until SRA. The proportions of individuals in each SC-subtype group who reported SRA beyond 14 days of injury were compared using Chi-square analyses. Analyses were performed with α=0.05.

Main Results Only six SC-subtypes were analyzed as no participants were classified into the vestibular subtype. No differences were observed between the remaining SC-subtype groups for days to SRA (F_(5,71) = 0.95, p= 0.50, d = 0.06 _[-.07,1.3]). Additionally, we did not observe a difference between the proportions of each SC-subtype group (p’s > 0.19) that reported SRA beyond 14 days of injury.

Conclusions Our data suggest that SC subtyping may not associate with the length of symptom recovery in collegiate athletes.