Concussion campaigner Peter Jess says football clubs need to take a far more cautious approach when allowing people to return to play following head trauma.
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Speaking following a paper released by the Florey Institute of Neuroscience and Mental Health, Jess said the timeframes in which players make an on-field comeback need to be altered.
Jess supports the British Medical Journal's position that clinically concussed players should not return to play for at least 19 days (adults) or 23 days (children) following the incident.
"The paper highlighted that the brain can be dysfunctional up to a month post the initial event creating the concussion, which will mean a re-calibration of the timeframes currently used to return to play," Jess said.
"The areas of the brain that have been isolated in the paper as being dysfunctional are at the core of executive function, which drives decision-making and switching tasks critical to elite sports."
Jess said research suggests that players who have suffered a clinical concussion are more likely to sustain orthopedic trauma in the following 12 months than players who have not suffered clinical concussion.
He said a "3 Step Return To Play Protocol" must be followed (see picture).
"The 3 Step Return To Play Protocol must be the minimum requirement before any clinically concussed player returns to play and in fact a mandated post-match protocol for all players," Jess said.
"There will need to be a change to the current position of the AFL and the clubs allowing players to return to play under 19 days, which is unsound.
"The AFL and clubs are now obliged to mitigate any system that has the possibility of creating long-term neurological damage.
"It may well be that if the 3 Step Return To Play Protocol is mandated that the AFL and clubs may have to contemplate an expansion of the current list numbers to accommodate the increase in players not being able to return on the current cycle of six to seven days."
Just last month it was revealed a disease linked to repeated concussions in American sport had been found in the brains of two former Australian rugby league players.
The discovery was the first time chronic traumatic encephalopathy had been identified in an NRL athlete.
In a story in The Courier, La Trobe University associate professor Alan Pearce boosted the call for sportspeople of all levels to pledge their brain to science.
"We really need to understand this from a wider perspective rather than just thinking of it as an elite sport issue," he said.
