Disease Found in 99 Percent of Brains Donated by NFL Families
Is there a future for professional football in the U.S. with this sort of problem? What responsible parents would urge their son to play a sport that puts them at serious risk for destroying their brains? Would you exchange the opportunity for great wealth for a sure case of brain damage?Over the last decade, one of the biggest stories in sports has been the mounting evidence of chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, in football players. The degenerative brain disease develops after repeated blows to the head, and a new study finds a strong link between playing football and CTE. As Daniella Emanuel at CNN reports, the brains of 110 out of 111 NFL players that were donated to the researchers showed signs of the disease.
The study, published this week in the journal JAMA, was based on autopsies of 202 deceased football players including those who did not play beyond the high school and college level. As Emanuel reports, in addition to the NFL players, the disease was found in 48 out of 53 college players and 3 of the 14 high school players.
The brains examined for the study came from subjects that ranged in age from 23 to 89 and from every position on the football field, from punters to linebackers, Joe Ward, Josh Williams and Sam Manchester report for The New York Times. In the brains examined, the largest number of CTE cases were found in linemen, running backs and defensive backs. Eighty-six percent of the professional players in the study had severe cases of the disease as did 56 percent of the college players.
“There's no question that there's a problem in football. That people who play football are at risk for this disease,” Ann McKee, director of Boston University's CTE Center and coauthor of the study tells Emanuel. “And we urgently need to find answers for not just football players, but veterans and other individuals exposed to head trauma.”
