It’s the time of year when the glorious thing we Texans have looked forward to all year — football season — is starting to wrap up. We’re all looking forward to the college bowl games and the NFL is rounding out the end of the regular season. While we tend to glorify the sport around these parts, as of late there’s mounting evidence that football puts players, especially NFL players, at a serious risk of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE).
In late November, the authors of research published in the Journal of Neurology estimated that a minimum of 10 percent of NFL players will eventually develop the degenerative brain disease CTE. The researchers explained that this would tease out to, on any given NFL play, a minimum of two players out of 22 on the field. The disease is associated with symptoms such as cognitive impairment, impulsive behavior, and suicidal thoughts.
This new research builds upon a July 2017 study that rocked the football universe. Those findings found evidence of CTE, which is only diagnosable upon death, in the brains of 110 of the 111 former NFL players by a group at Boston University. After the release of the study in the journal JAMA, experts were quick to explain the lack of context with this statistic, noting that it only included the brains that were donated after death by families who noticed symptoms associated with CTE.
While it’s impossible to know exactly how biased the sample of NFL players’ was, the new study endeavors to ascertain what can be taken from the knowledge that at least 110 brains were diseased. These new estimations look at an array of possibilities, including the unlikely event that the JAMA study’s sample of 111 brains included every brain of a former player who had CTE and died during the 2008-2016 duration of the study. According to an article in Inside Science, comparing the number of diseased brains to the total of 1142 who died yields a minimum prevalence of 9.6 percent.
Inside Science reporter Jesse Mez, one of the authors of the 2017 JAMA paper and a neurologist at Boston University, referred to the new research as an important extension of the work in their paper. “It starts to provide a framework or a ballpark for what the prevalence of the disease among NFL players might be,” he said.
To put things into perspective, earlier this year, Adam Finkel, a former rulemaking director and regional administrator for the Occupational Safety and Health Administration who now studies quantitative risk assessment at both the University of Michigan and the University of Pennsylvania, used a different approach to report a minimum risk of about 1 percent. “One percent is a huge number,” Finkel said. “It doesn’t matter whether it will grow to 10 percent or 15 percent or 50 percent. It’s already a big number.”
There’s still much to be understood about CTE and the risk to football players, especially those who will never get coverage playing college or pro. Examining those risks at every level, from youth football and to the professional level, provides challenges. No question, it would be beneficial to have a test that could determine CTE prior to death.
However, it is clear that for those few players who are fortunate enough to make it to the NFL, researchers are discovering a large risk for the potentially debilitating disease.
Sources:
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10807039.2018.1456899
https://www.insidescience.org/news/whats-risk-chronic-traumatic-encephalopathy-nfl-players
http://n.neurology.org/content/early/2018/11/27/WNL.0000000000006699