Heading for an uncertain future
Families of former football players reveal the pain of dementia after a recent study revealed a link to heightened risks.
Former footballer John Garwood’s family knew that something was very wrong when he was found driving the wrong way down the A30 in Cornwall last year.
Until very recently, Garwood had been fit and well, still working and playing golf past his 80th birthday.
The former Daily Mail worker had spent a life playing football and loving sport. A lifelong Millwall fan, he played for the club’s support sides, as well as Wimbledon, and Falmouth Town after moving to Cornwall in the early 1960s.
‘‘He was a proper old-school player,’’ says his daughter, Hayley Wood, who was regaled with stories of broken legs and full-body tackles when she was growing up.
‘‘He talked about the importance of not being scared and heading the ball.’’
Now, Wood believes her father’s courage in the tackle as a left back has caused the frontotemporal dementia that now racks his life – diagnosed a year after the incident on the A30.
Unlike other forms of dementia, frontotemporal dementia causes a sufferer to be confused and fixated on certain habits. Right now, Garwood always wants to eat fish and chips: as we speak, his daughter is preparing to take him out for dinner. ‘‘The last 12 months has progressed so very quickly,’’ says Wood.
A year ago, her father was driving around and living an independent life. Today, he is occasionally found walking the streets of Falmouth at 4am, unaware of the time. His family have moved him closer to them to look after him as his mental capacity declines.
They bought him a satellite TV subscription so he can enjoy the sports he so loves. But, Wood explains: ‘‘He can’t even work out how to switch the telly on unless we do. He can’t change the channel.’’
Garwood is one of a multitude of former football players reckoning with a retirement full of confusion, black hole memory and anguish for families drawn in to support them. His best friend, once a star player for Truro, is also battling Alzheimer’s and vascular dementia.
A landmark report published last month by University of Glasgow researchers indicates that former professional footballers are three-and-a-half times more likely to die of dementia than the average – a phenomenon believed to be linked to head injuries.
The report was triggered thanks to the campaigning of the Jeff Astle Foundation, a charity set up in the name of former professional footballer Jeff Astle, who died due to chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a trauma previously linked to contact sports like boxing.
‘‘It’s big news in the field, a striking set of results,’’ says Nikos Gogoraptis, a clinical lecturer in neurology at Imperial College London. ‘‘It shows an increase in the diagnosis of dementia as the cause of death, as well as the prescription of medicines for dementia in football players – more so than in the general population in Scotland.’’
But Gogoraptis says the research throws up more questions than answers. Whether there is a direct cause and effect isn’t fully explored, nor is there much acknowledgement of other potential factors – such as the fact that exfootballers are likely to be more health-conscious than their peers and so may turn to medical help earlier.
That said, many footballers are working-class men. ‘‘Working-class men by their very nature are stubborn, cantankerous, very proud and don’t like going to the doctors,’’ explains David Lovenbury, a non-executive member of the charity, Dementia Matters.
Those men include Lovenbury’s father Sid, who played for Leek Town and broke his leg in a trial game for Stoke City, which cut short any plans to be a professional. He was diagnosed with dementia, after
30 years of avoiding the doctors, at the age of 75.
Sid Lovenbury had travelled with his wife and family down to London to watch Stoke City play West Ham. But his son knew something was wrong. ‘‘He had no sense he was going to watch Stoke City, despite having been a season-ticket holder for
50 years. He hadn’t grasped he was off to Upton Park. He was completely oblivious. That was the first time we recognised there was an issue.’’
The family eventually convinced him to visit his GP, who referred him to a memory clinic. He failed 30 out of 30 questions asked of him, including
his name, the time and his son’s name.
‘‘He would play two games a week and head the ball 12 or 15 times a game,’’ says Lovenbury. ‘‘He would be just like a boxer, a little bit punch-drunk. Do I have any evidence to suggest my dad’s vascular dementia is down to playing football? No. But there must be some sort of contributory factor.’’
Gogoraptis and others are focusing their attention on football to catch up to the research done in contact sports, where studies have been undertaken to connect concussions and blows to the head with the build-up of so-called Tau proteins, which kills brain cells, and is believed to cause a form of dementia called chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE).
‘‘The truth is we don’t know what’s happening,’’ says Magdalena Ietswaart, senior lecturer in psychology at the University of Stirling.
‘‘What we do know is that actual brain damage, including repeated concussion, is related to damage and neurodegenerative disease.’’ However, the fine detail of how one leads to the other is not yet well-established. ‘‘We don’t really have a good understanding of the why of things and the underlying mechanisms. That science still needs to be done, but it needs to be funded.’’
Last week, Hayley Wood took her father shopping in Truro. He begged her to take him to the football ground as he had to sign up to play for the club.
‘‘He has no concept he’s 84,’’ she says. The same day, they passed a sports shop: he said he had to go in and get football boots. ‘‘It’s a very good chance football has caused this,’’ she laments, ‘‘it’s caused his inability to comprehend what he wants.’’
There is a note of caution, however. ‘‘Two hundred and fifty million people expose themselves routinely to this heading and I don’t think it causes damage,’’ says Ietswaart.
‘‘You reduce a whole host of other diseases by taking part in football at a serious level,’’ adds Gogoraptis.
Lovenbury is concerned about the potential pitfalls for footballers outside the top flight. ‘‘Professional footballers have safety nets like the Professional Footballers’ Association,’’ he says. ‘‘But imagine the millions who are getting vascular dementia now who played the game at an amateur level? At that level, you don’t get any support.’’
Wood is reticent about major changes to the sport without further evidence. Moves towards introducing substitutions of players suspected of suffering a concussion are to be welcomed, but much more work is to be done before permanently changing the beautiful game.
‘‘Football now is a very different thing,’’ she says. ‘‘That’s not to say there isn’t a very real risk now, but I think it needs to be researched. I’d hate for a game I love, my dad loves and my husband loves to become something it doesn’t need to be.’’
‘‘Imagine the millions who are getting vascular dementia now who played the game at an amateur level?’’
David Lovenbury, Dementia Matters