UFC veteran Ronda Rousey has spoken openly about some neurological issues that she’s looked into since retirement.
When you talk about women’s mixed martial arts, you can’t avoid the subject of Ronda Rousey. In many ways, her stint in the UFC helped bring the sport into the mainstream. She has been able to cross over into pop culture in a way that few other fighters have, and she deserves recognition for that.
Of course, a lot of fans remember Rousey through her two defeats at the hands of Holly Holm and Amanda Nunes. She hasn’t returned to the sport since, and instead desired to pursue a new venture in the form of professional wrestling.
In a recent interview, Rousey opened up regarding neurological problems stemming from her fighting career.
Rousey opens up about issues
“Dana sent me to this long-term fighters’ neurological study and they actually made some—I wouldn’t call them breakthroughs, but actually were able to diagnose a lot of the stuff that was going on with me and I guess still is. I just didn’t have all the information at that time. So, I couldn’t hand that information to me then to explain things better now, so no, I don’t dwell on that at all. It was the best I could do with what I had.”
“He was saying that people that get migraines are actually more susceptible to concussions and the more concussions that you get, the easier it is for these impacts to set off a migraine,” Rousey said.
“And he was saying that not all migraines involve a searing headache, the headache part isn’t part of all of it and so what we think was going on was we kind of ended up in this feedback loop of the more concussions I was getting the easier it was to set off these migraines and so in these fights.
“Go figure, two of my triggers is bright lights and head impacts—so I’d get hit and I’d basically lose big chunks of my vision and my depth perception and my ability to track movements quickly and make snap decisions, which is basically all the things that I need and I thought I have a concussion, I’m out on my feet, but I wouldn’t be stumbling around. I didn’t lose my balance. This was like, I had to retire because this kept happening to me more and more often to the point where I would get a jab and I would basically go blind.”