Study of pro stars’ brains imperfect but deeply
It has been a bad couple of weeks for concussion deniers, if such a phenomenon still exists.
The most shocking news for many was the revelation that 99 per cent of brains of former NFL players came back positive for chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE).
Which wasn’t really a revelation at all but it made for some harrowing imagery.
The brains were donated to the Boston University School of Medicine because the former players or their families suspected they were damaged and believed that head injuries suffered playing American football were the likely cause.
In other words, there was an inherent bias in the study. There was no control group from which any accurate estimate as to the percentage of NFL players who might be affected could be gleaned.
But there were several other nuggets in the study that lead author Dr Ann McKee says, are “impossible to ignore”.
While everybody focused on the 110 of 111 former NFL brains being affected by CTE, the more frightening number in many respects was that three out of 14 high school players’ brains were affected and 48 out of 53 college football players.
Even given the lack of control group, what this tells us is that CTE’s seemingly irreversible effects — 71 per cent of those who showed severe CTE pathology had dementia symptoms — can be established early.
The biggest positional group affected were linemen. They are involved in collisions on virtually every play, providing a clue (but no definitive proof) that the role you play in contact sports could increase or decrease your chances of cognitive impairment later, and in some cases not much later, in life.
The release of the study was widely picked up by major media outlets around the world and came with a follow-up: Baltimore Ravens’ linebacker John Urschel, a bona fide mathematics genius, decided the CTE odds were stacked against him and retired from the sport at the age of 26.
Less widely reported, however, was the fact that Congress had to ask NFL commissioner Roger Goodell why his organisation had withheld $18 million of the $30m they had committed to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for CTE research.
The letter also asked the NFL whether it planned to renew the agreement and planned to provide additional funding beyond its original commitment. The suggestion was the NFL rescinded the money because it disagreed with the NIH using a particular CTE researcher.
The NFL reportedly later wrote to owners — including the Dallas Cowboys’ Jerry Jones, who is on record as saying it is “absurd” to acknowledge a link between his sport and CTE — saying it would honour the payment, but the ballyhoo