Will Occipital Skull Reduction Make Me More Susceptible To A Skull Fracture From Contact Sports?

Q: Dr. Eppley, If you play contact sports like soccer or football, will occipital skull reduction affect your game?(Example: making your skull weak because the outer cortex is being removed and rough contact to the head can injure you badly.) 

A: This is a common question about any form of skull reduction surgery and the answer is no it will not. The skull is composed of two hard cortical layers of which only one of those layers is removed in skull reduction surgery, still leaving a good layer of bone protection intact. It is fair to say like many structures in the human body that the skull is over engineered and provides more bone protection than we typically need.

Dr. Barry Eppley

Indianapolis, Indiana