THAT FIRST STEP IS NOT SOLVED YET — WHETHER THERE’S A DEFINITIVE LINK TO CONCUSSIONS … SO HOW CAN YOU EVEN THINK ABOUT WHO’S THE MOST SUSCEPTIBLE, WHO’S NOT?

Nowinski and McKee have undoubtedly saved lives and aided the concussion recoveries of countless athletes because of their tireless advocacy in raising awareness of concussions and CTE. It’s just that not all experts in their field concur with all of their conclusions.

Dr. Lili-Naz Hazrati is a Toronto neuropathologist. She is an associate professor at University of Toronto and works at both Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children and the Canadian Concussion Centre. She has examined dozens of brains of former professional athletes.

In a phone interview from Toronto, Hazrati told Postmedia she has not found nearly the high incidence of CTE as McKee and the others. What’s more, Hazrati said she’s troubled by the study’s lumping of brains showing minuscule traces of CTE (stages 1 and 2) with much more severe Stage 3 or 4 cases, and that as a result of the shocking 99 per cent prevalence figure, she is concerned media and the public are inferring an unsupported conclusion that not only football, but all contact sports, are extremely dangerous for all participants.

“When you look at their numbers (in the study), quite a bit of their CTE diagnoses are just, like, that tiny little spot,” Hazrati said. “Stage 1 means that they’ve looked through the whole brain and have found one tiny little spot where there are a few cells positive with tau protein (a primary CTE marker). In that whole brain there are very limited amounts of tau, and in one small area.

“If they call that CTE, fine — but then they bunch it with the ones with more severe, advanced CTE, and they call the whole bunch CTE. It’s like counting burn patients but even including me, who has a little burn at the very tip of my finger, and also everyone who has been burned somehow even any little bit, and lumping us all in with the severely burned.”

Nowinski, one of the study’s authors, takes great exception to Hazrati’s comments on this particular issue.

“I think Dr. Hazrati is severely mischaracterizing the study,” Nowinski wrote in an email to Postmedia. “Only 11 of 177 cases (six per cent) were Stage 1, so while a neuropathologist can complain that they think they have a better minimum criteria for diagnosis, it has no implication on the overall findings.

“A burn on the tip of your finger, which is an injury and does not turn into a progressive disease, is a completely

DR. ANN MCKEE / THE ASSOCIATED PRESS A recent study by Scottish neuropathologist Dr. William Stewart found “no significant associations between number of concussions and performance on cognitive tests.”