Brain Disease In Football

Brain Disease Endangers Football To a high school football player, the idea of a disease being severe enough to endanger his revered sport likely evokes outrage, or at the very least, a severe case of skepticism. And understandably so. Football has defined our culture, and for many, served as a proud way of life for nearly a century. Without football, high school -and really all of America- just wouldn’t be the same. Unfortunately, new studies demonstrate that this “disease” may hold some validity -so much validity, in fact, that thousands of parents are now choosing to withhold their child’s participation in the sport. The disease, called Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy or CTE for short, is a variation of dementia caused by the
formation of an abnormal protein known as Tau in the brain. How does this relate to football? As you may have already guessed: concussions. Research at the University of Michigan has shown that the average high school football player sustains approximately 50 head impacts per week and about 774 per season.
Dr. Stefan Duma, a professor at Virginia Tech, discovered that players as young as seven have sustained impact injuries equivalent to those experienced in a car accident, which is alarming when the force exerted on a brain by a 50 pound child is replaced with that of a 250 pound man. It is the accumulation of these seemingly minor concussive and subconcussive hits inherent to football that doctors presume to result in CTE. In fact, a majority of athletes later found to be suffering from the disease had never even experienced a loss of consciousness renowned for being associated with severe head injury; they simply played the sport of football, taking hit after hit for the extent of their careers. Because it was first discovered by Dr. Bennett Omalu only 14 years ago and its existence can only be verified by examining a person’s brain after death, very little is known about CTE; no cure exists and there is still no way to slow brain degeneration. Some common trends noticed in victims include severe confusion, difficulty with motor and balance skills, inability to organize thoughts, frustration, aggression, erratic behavior, personality changes, depression, and the thinking and memory deterioration characteristic of common dementia. CTE differs in that it onsets much earlier, beginning in the 40s rather than in the 60s or
70s. Many sufferers including former NFL players Junior Seau, Jovan Belcher, and Ray Easterling have committed suicide as a result of frustration and depression caused by brain atrophy. As shown below, in advanced stages a brain with CTE is reduced to half the size of its former, healthy state.

Several living athletes, such as former 49er Ronnie Lott, are concerned about the disease. Lott stated at last year’s Super Bowl, “Everyone should think they have it and then work to slow it down by working to have a better life.” Dr. Omalu anticipates that 90% of all NFL players have or will develop the disease. As of October 2015, 91 brains of former NFL players from every position (except kicker) were examined. Eighty-seven had CTE. When it comes to our football athletes here at CV, two of the three interviewed were completely unaware of their significant predisposition, claiming to have little or no knowledge that CTE even existed. None of the three players expressed any concern regarding their risk for CTE, and only one said he was worried about sustaining a concussion. These statistics place the team’s coaches in a questionable position, as it is quite apparent they’ve neglected to provide their players a clear and accurate warning of the sport’s likelihood to inflict severe brain disease on its loyal participants.