CTE used to be connected to boxers and was known as the “punch drunk” that caused boxers to be slow in movement, act confused, etc. as if drunk. In March 2015 ESPN released an article saying the CTE was a “rare phenomenon and that youth football was “safer than riding a bike” (2). This debate was sparked after Chris Borland of the 49ers took a very early retirement and expressed his reasons for doing so were to protect himself from future brain injury. Two weeks ago ESPN released another article saying that CTE was in fact found in 96% of deceased NFL players tested (1). That is a whopping 87 of the 91 players tested.
The NFL has donated over $1 million in research grants to further study brain diseases connected to brain trauma. The NFL has also changed its rules in order to protect players, such as in 2010 they ruled that the play was dead as soon as a player lost a helmet, and implemented stricter concussion protocols. Although the NFL has put forth effort to decrease the risks involved, it’s still football and hard hits are inevitable. With more research, players can be better protected and hopefully the occurrence of head injuries can decrease. Until then, CTE is just another reason that mama thinks football is the devil.
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(4) http://www.nfl.com/news/story/09000d5d81990bdf/article/new-nfl-rules-designed-to-limit-head-injuries
1.) This is an interesting topic to discuss and research information about. I saw that in another recent study examining the relationship between football and Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, they ran tests on 165 people. Each one of these individuals played football at some point in their lives: some only reaching high school level and some reaching all the way up to the NFL. However, even with this seemingly wide range of experience, the numbers remained pretty consistent with the article the ESPN article that you referenced above. Out of the 165 brains that were examined, 131 of them displayed characteristics of CTE. This also quantifies as 79.4% of the individuals tested showed signs of CTE.
ReplyDeleteLink to Article: http://www.digitaltrends.com/sports/with-96-of-ex-nfl-players-brains-testing-positive-for-cte-something-has-to-be-done/
2.) The physical impacts that CTE has on the brain is impactful. The Boston University CTE Center - in direct affiliation with the Boston University Alzheimer's Disease Center - provides images of three different brains when these brains are stained for the tau protein, which shows up as a dark brown color when tau protein is present. The upper left and bottom left brain scans are for a 65 year old individual with no traces of tau protein in his/her brain. The upper middle and lower middle images show tau protein present in the amygdala and the temporal cortex of John Grimsley. This supports the assertion that CTE may impair judgement and impact peoples' emotions.
Link to Article: http://www.bu.edu/cte/about/what-is-cte/
3.) This same organization (BU CTE Center) is conducting multiple research projects right now in regards to CTE. One research project is the "Direct Study." This project aims to use technology and a variety of tests like the MRI scan, amount of proteins in the spinal fluid, and blood tests, in order to diagnose someone with CTE while that person is still alive.
Link to Article: http://www.bu.edu/cte/our-research/clinical-studies-detect/
For more information about other CTE research projects: http://www.bu.edu/cte/our-research/
I read your blog post and found it very interesting. It has similar ties with my first post which addressed measuring the impact strength of a soccer ball contacting the head of a soccer player. Recognition of CTE in American sports leagues such as the NFL have caused and increased awareness of this important issue in other sports(1). While the NFL has a reputation of hard hits and reckless tackles, soccer is often overlooked at a contact sport. In the game of soccer there are occasional person-person collisions but the header, an integral part of the world’s game, can cause CTE in players. Headers range in impact force from a gentle redirection to blocking a powerful shot on goal. Mama may have thought “football to be the devil” but is soccer that much better? I remember days in soccer practice where we would run drills to practice headers. I probably headed the ball nearly 100 times in two hours and inevitably developed a headache. Today, soccer players do not wear helmets and most would never want to. Soccer is a world-wide sport played by people of all ages. I see only two possible ways to alleviate the concussion problem is soccer: 1) remove headers entirely and 2) require mouth guards or helmets. The dynamics of the game would change drastically and numerous minds would need to be swayed to accomplish either of those changes. To solve the CTE problem, governing bodies in soccer must follow the example of the NFL and research ways to alleviate concussions in athletes.
ReplyDelete1) http://www.newyorker.com/news/sporting-scene/cost-header
I totally agree that soccer players can endure similar injuries and as a result get CTE as well. CTE is now being studied more and in 2013 the first baseball player was diagnosed with CTE. These sports that are viewed as non-contact can be misleading and cause players to be even more at risk because the effects are downplayed. I think that head injuries should never been taken lightly and the common practice of headers probably needs to be changed. I think as these studies progress they will find even more sports connecting to CTE and it should just further reinforce that athletes need to be better protected.
DeleteThis article speaks to be for as a former football player myself I am shocked that many of us do not realize the risks we undertake before donning our helmets for the first time. I think that we should be focusing our research on how to prevent concussions within high impact sports if we are to reduce the prevalence of CTE. Some studies conducted on traumatic brain injuries (TBI's) in fields other than sports show that higher instances of TBI's, especially if they were chronic, were correlated to having a higher concentration of tau proteins (Olivera et al. 2015). Furthermore, I disagree that requiring helmets and mouth guards in other sports such as soccer would decrease the prevalence of TBI's because while they have been shown to reduce direct impact damage, they have not been shown to reduce the prevalence of concussions (Harmon et al. 2013). This is most likely due to the fact that, while preventing direct contact, they do nothing to stop the movement of the brain within the skull. This means that helmets do not prevent contrecoup and diffuse axonal shearing within the brain, direct damage to neurons which could be causing the increase of tau proteins due to the destabilization of axons (Kaufman & Milstein, 2007). This type of internal damage of the brain has also been seen in soldiers who wear helmets for it is the concussive shockwaves of blasts that cause TBI's in soldiers who have not been directly hit (Hoge et al. 2008) I think that integrating rules that reduce the amount of direct blows to the head would be more beneficial than introducing equipment that we believe makes sports safer only to find out that the prevalence of CTE has not been reduced. Honestly, I believe that this would be an excellent field of study for if we could find the connection between TBIs and CTE in regards to tau proteins we might have a chance to not only reduce CTE but diseases caused by tau proteins such as Alzheimer's.
ReplyDeleteReferences
Harmon, K. G., Drezner, J. A., Gammons, M., Guskiewicz, K. M., Halstead, M., Herring, S. A., & ... Roberts, W. O. (2013). American Medical Society for Sports Medicine position statement: concussion in sport. British Journal Of Sports Medicine, 47(1), 15-26. doi:10.1136/bjsports-2012-091941
Hoge, C. W., McGurk, D., Thomas, J. L., Cox, A. L., Engel, C. C., & Castro, C. A. (2008). Mild Traumatic Brain Injury in U.S. Soldiers Returning from Iraq. New England Journal Of Medicine, 358(5), 453-463. doi:10.1056/NEJMoa072972
Kaufman, D., & Milstein, M. (2007). Traumatic Brain Injury. In Clinical neurology for psychiatrists (7th ed., pp. 527-536). Elsevier.
Olivera, A., Lejbman, N., Jeromin, A., French, L. M., Kim, H., Cashion, A., & ... Gill, J. (2015). Peripheral Total Tau in Military Personnel Who Sustain Traumatic Brain Injuries During Deployment. JAMA Neurology, doi:10.1001/jamaneurol.2015.1383