Bang to Rights: Science is taking big steps toward understanding the impact of concussion

From The Economist:

FRED McNEILL, an American-football player, died in November at the age of 63. Between 1974 and 1985 he appeared for the Minnesota Vikings. After leaving them he became a lawyer but in later years suffered from dementia and was told that he had signs of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a degenerative brain disease. His recent death has become a milestone in the understanding of brain disorders, for post-mortem examination has confirmed this diagnosis—retrospectively making him the first person to be so diagnosed while alive.

And:

Suffer the little children

In the end, adult athletes can make up their own minds about what risks they wish to take. Children, though, cannot. It is therefore children who should attract the greatest attention. Not only are some children obliged to play contact sports at school, but they may also be participating in an environment that encourages a “stiff upper lip” when they are injured. Yet it has been clear since a study published in 2012 by Andrew Mayer at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque that subtle brain changes in children who have sustained a concussion persist for months after the injury, even when there are no longer any obvious symptoms.

Work published last December by Charles Hillman of the University of Illinois found that children who had sustained a single sports-related concussion still had impaired brain function two years later. Ten-year-olds with a history of concussion performed worse on tests of working memory, attention and impulse control than did uninjured confrères. Among the children with a history of concussion, those who were injured earlier in life had larger deficits. This study was small (it involved 15 injured participants) but if subsequent research confirms it, that will be great cause for concern.

Concussion—once an invisible injury—is rapidly being illuminated. Many sports-lovers have been disturbed to learn that injuries on the field have caused their heroes to undergo profound personality changes. And many parents now worry, with good reason, about their children playing sports. Taking one for the team is all very well. But the price of doing so may be paid over a lifetime.

To read the complete article go here.

Don't Let Kids Play Football

Opinion Piece from Dr. Bennett Omalu in the New York Times. Omalu is the Chief Medical Examiner of San Joaquin County, California, and an associate clinical professor of pathology at University of California, Davis.

We are born with a certain number of neurons. We can only lose them; we cannot create new neurons to replenish old or dying ones.

and:

Over the past two decades it has become clear that repetitive blows to the head in high-impact contact sports like football, ice hockey, mixed martial arts and boxing place athletes at risk of permanent brain damage. There is even a Hollywood movie, “Concussion,” due out this Christmas Day, that dramatizes the story of my discoveries in this area of research. Why, then, do we continue to intentionally expose our children to this risk?

If a child who plays football is subjected to advanced radiological and neurocognitive studies during the season and several months after the season, there can be evidence of brain damage at the cellular level of brain functioning, even if there were no documented concussions or reported symptoms. If that child continues to play over many seasons, these cellular injuries accumulate to cause irreversible brain damage, which we know now by the name Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, or C.T.E., a disease that I first diagnosed in 2002.

Depending on the severity of the condition, the child now has a risk of manifesting symptoms of C.T.E. like major depression, memory loss, suicidal thought and actions, loss of intelligence as well as dementia later in life. C.T.E. has also been linked to drug and alcohol abuse as the child enters his 20s, 30s and 40s

To read the whole story go here.

“There was a culture, an attitude about athletic safety that was sort of stuck in an old era,”

Like many Montgomery County high school football teams, Blair used to field a makeshift medical staff. Sometimes an assistant coach would tend to the injured player. Other times, a volunteer doctor would examine the athlete, according to third-year Coach Andrew Fields.

“It was kind of a free-for-all,” Fields said.

But the sideline dynamics at the Silver Spring school changed last season, with Montgomery County placing certified athletic trainers at each of its 25 public high schools. The health care professionals worked about 20-30 hours per week, patrolling the sidelines during home games of all sports and assisting the athletes before and during practices...

...“There was a culture, an attitude about athletic safety that was sort of stuck in an old era,” said Tom Hearn, a Montgomery County sports safety advocate. “The fact that they’re in it now is hopefully a sign of better attention.”...

 https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/highschools/montgomery-county-certified-athletic-trainers-program-is-met-with-approval/2015/08/13/94e5e5fa-41cc-11e5-846d-02792f854297_story.html

Scientists Dissected the Brains of 79 NFL Players. What They Found Is Disturbing.

From Mother Jones:  To read the full story go here.

The latest data from Boston University researchers is more bad news for the reeling league.

—By Sam Brodey Wed Oct. 1, 2014 5:41 PM EDT

Yesterday, the country's leading investigators of sports-related brain injuries released what could be their most shocking finding yet: Of the 79 deceased NFL players examined, 76 showed evidence of chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE. The researchers at the Boston University CTE Center have examined, in total, the brains of 128 people who played football at all levels—from high school to the pros—and 101 showed evidence of CTE. The numbers buttress a growing body of evidence that suggests that playing football at any level can lead to grave health consequences.

In case you haven't been following the story, here's how CTE works: When the brain is subjected to repeated trauma—from the severe (and rare) concussion-causing hits to the repetitive, smaller impacts a lineman might absorb thousands of times in his career—its tissue starts to deteriorate. That causes the buildup of abnormal tau proteins, which interfere with a whole host of critical brain functions. In the short term, it can lead to memory loss and impaired judgment; in the long term, it can lead to severe depression and dementia. Ex-players describe its symptoms as crushing, and in many cases, the pain, unpredictable outbursts of rage, and memory loss becomes too much to bear.

 

Three images of brain tissue, with tau protein in brown. The left sample is from a nonplayer subject, the middle comes from a football player, and the right belongs to a boxer. Courtesy of the Boston University Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy.

Friday Night Lights Out: The Concussion Debate Hits the Texas Youth Leagues

Friday Night Lights Out: The Concussion Debate Hits the Texas Youth Leagues

by Pete Freedman Oct 26, 2013 5:45 AM EDT

 After years of heated debate, the NFL is finally taking concussions seriously. But how are they being handled in football’s lower levels? Pete Freedman reports from football-crazed Texas.

On the evening of Monday, September 23, emergency room doctors determined that 12-year-old Connor Curreri of Dallas had suffered a concussion during a football practice held that afternoon. Five weeks later, the seventh-grader has yet to complete a full day of school.

For the entire article go here.

Does Football Have a Future?

Amidst the discussions of the dangers of artificial turf now being installed at prohibitive costs across the county, under a no-bid contract with FieldTurfTarkett, new advances in medicine show the dangers of football. So, how safe is football, especially for children and adolescents?

A new article in the latest New Yorker magazine, by Ben McGrath, has this to say about football, below.  Read the full article here.

Chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or C.T.E., is the name for a condition that is believed to result from major collisions—or from the accumulation of subconcussions that are nowhere near as noticeable, including those incurred in practice. It was first diagnosed, in 2002, in the brain of the Pittsburgh Steelers Hall of Fame center Mike Webster, who died of a heart attack after living out of his truck for a time. It was next diagnosed in one of Webster’s old teammates on the Steelers’ offensive line, Terry Long, who killed himself by drinking antifreeze. Long overlapped, at the end of his career, with Justin Strzelczyk, who was also found to have C.T.E. after he crashed, fatally, into a tanker truck, while driving the wrong way down the New York Thruway.

And:

What we now know, from reading Schwarz [note: Alan Schwarz, a New York Times journalist], is that retired N.F.L. players are five to nineteen times as likely as the general population to have received a dementia-related diagnosis; that the helmet-manufacturing industry is overseen by a volunteer consortium funded largely by helmet manufacturers; and that Lou Gehrig may not actually have had the disease that bears his name but suffered from concussion-related trauma instead. (Since 1960, fourteen N.F.L. players have had a diagnosis of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, which is about twelve more than you would expect from a random population sample.)

And:

Between 1982 and 2009, according to the National Center for Catastrophic Injury Research, two hundred and ninety-five fatalities directly or indirectly resulted from high-school football. From 1977 to 2009, at all levels, three hundred and seven cervical-cord injuries were recorded. And between 1984 and 2009 there were a hundred and thirty-three instances of brain damage—not slowly accruing damage, as in the case of C.T.E., but damage upon impact. The injury incidence is far lower in most sports.

For more information, go to the Concussion Blog, here.