- All of these people have one thing in common.
They're all at risk for CTE,
Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy.
A brain disease caused by repetitive hits to the head.
- Go!
- Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy
is a progressive neurodegenerative brain disease.
That means symptoms don't begin until years
after the injuries and can often get worse over time,
causing dementia.
And here's the kicker,
you can only find out if you had it if you are dead.
When your head gets hit, nerve cells are damaged,
and a protein called tau gets released.
Repeated hits to the head lead to more tau.
When nerve cells are damaged, tau comes off
and starts clumping up, becoming tangled.
Tau can kill brain cells if enough builds up overtime.
High levels of tau in brain fluid
are linked to poor recovery
and neurodegeneration after head trauma.
The origins of the disease trace back nearly
a century ago when it was labeled pugilistic dementia,
a syndrome that was originally studied in boxers.
Forensic pathologist Dr. Harrison Stanford Martland
described the disease in 1928 through his study,
a Journal of the American Medical Association.
He noted tremors, slowed movement, confusion
and speech problems being typical of the condition.
The disease was brought up again in 1949
by a British neurologist who published a study
in a paper titled Punch-drunk syndrome:
Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy of Boxers.
But it later become clear that the disease was appearing
in athletes who never dawned a pair of boxing gloves.
- CTE appeared in the limelight in the early 2000's
when Nigerian neuropathologist Bennet Omalu worked
on a case with former Hall of Fame NFL player Mike Webster,
who played for the Pittsburgh Steelers.
After retirement, Webster began to show signs
of depression, extreme mood swings and eventually, dementia.
Footage from the documentary League of Denial shows Webster
being interviewed and stopping mid-sentence.
- The things we do to one another, okay,
hell, I don't know what I'm saying.
I'm just tired and confused right now.
That's why I say, I can't really.
I can't say it the way I want to say it.
I gotta, I could, I could answer this real easily
at other times, but right now, I'm just tired.
- Webster had CTE
and was the first NFL player diagnosed
with the degenerative brain disease.
Omalu's discovery led researchers
to study the potential link of brain trauma
in football and CTE further.
In 2017, neuropathologist Ann McKee released her own study
in The Journal of the American Medical Association.
McKee and her researchers studied 111 former NFL players
whose brains were donated for research
and discovered that 110 of them had CTE.
- We're really starting to understand
the earliest manifestations of this disease,
and of course, our main objective,
our overarching goal is to help the people that are living.
Be able to diagnosis this disease during life
so we can bring some hope and optimism to these people.
If we can diagnose it, we can also monitor it,
and we can test different therapies
to see if they're effective in treating the disease.
- In the early stages of CTE, researchers found
the most common cause of death among those
with mild levels of CTE was suicide.
One of the highest profile examples
was the case of Aaron Hernandez,
a former New England Patriots star,
who was convicted of first-degree murder in 2013.
He murdered Odin Lloyd,
a former friend who dated Hernandez's fiance.
- Guilty of murder in the first degree.
- You're committed to the NCI Cedar Junction
for a term of your natural life
without the possibility of parole.
- I knew he was gonna have CTE,
'cause you just don't get that amount of damage
without seeing the changes under the microscope.
- And while in prison,
Hernandez committed suicide.
For those in the later stages, dementia
and Parkinson's disease was the leading cause of death.
- And it's estimated that, you know,
the average football players gets
between hundreds to 1000 hits per season.
If you played for 10 years, you can,
you can imagine that's 10,000 hits.
That's what we're trying to get more awareness about.
We need to limit the amount of contact
in football and collision sports.
- Among 27 participants
that were found to have mild CTE,
26 had behavioral or mood issues before their deaths.
Of the 84 deceased players with more severe cases,
89% had behavioral or mood symptoms.
- We're over 500 brains.
I think it's about 550 at this point,
it may not be quite that many,
and we're well over 360 with the diagnosis of CTE.
- It's not just professional athletes
or military soldiers that are being affected,
younger athletes are at risk
for long-term consequences for later in life.
Scientists have found that on average,
playing tackle football before the age of 12
would lead to cognitive issues 13.39 years earlier.
Behavioral and mood problems would arise 13.28 years earlier
for those who began to play at 12 or older.
Not only are young individuals at the forefront
of CTE research, animals prone to brain injuries
are also being studied as well.
Gregory Myer, director of research in sports medicine
at Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center, offered
his take in this New York Times article.
Bighorn sheep ram their heads into each other
and woodpeckers slam their heads
against trees thousands of a time a day.
Myer's research has suggested
that both of these animals' brains
are well protected against concussions due
to a phenomenon called the bubble wrap effect.
Their brains are naturally protected with mechanisms
that slow the return of blood
from the head to the body, increasing blood volume
that fills their brains' vascular tree.
Outside of football, other sports
have introduced concussion protocols.
They're designed to keep players
who may have sustained a traumatic brain injury
from returning to the game.
- NFL players no longer practice as much in pads
during the week and during training camps.
The NFL has changed rules in terms
of where a player can be hit.
You no longer can but that used
to be a staple of NFL defenses.
- While safety reforms
have been made to player concussions,
NFL officials and college football coaches
have often been criticized for questioning
the research between football and CTE.
- It's clear that there is a link,
so why they're denying it, I don't know.
But there will come a time,
hopefully sooner rather or later,
that we will have a living diagnosis.
And at that point, leagues will no longer be able to say,
oh, we're, you know, we still need more science,
the science will be there.
- Legislators across the U.S.
have offered bills that would ban tackle football
before the age of 12,
but they've seen little traction becoming law.
And well, the push for legislation
comes as youth tackle football
has seen a decline in participation.
Interesting enough, it's a decline
that's been seen at a regional level.
- The fears about CTE and the fears
about the long-term damage to a child's health
is a concern for any parent.
And we're seeing parents ask more questions.
We're seeing parents raise more concerns.
Where then, we'll be able to say it,
okay, this person is predisposed genetically,
or, you know, we can monitor.
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