The brains of deceased football players hold an ominous warning for current National Football League athletes.
A new study examining the brains of NFL players found 99 percent of them had chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), the degenerative neurological disease linked with repeated blows to the head. Donated brains from the athletes, ranging from 23 to 89 year old, had played various positions on offense, defense, and special teams.
Dr. Ann McKee, a neuropathologist and director of the CTE Center at Boston University, found signs of the disease in all but one of the 111 NFL brains studied. Out of the 202 brains examined in total, 87 percent of them had CTE and played football for an average of 15 years.
CTE causes a variety of symptoms including memory loss, emotional instability, confusion, depression, impulsive thoughts, and dementia. These problems can appear years after the brain trauma has stopped, but the disease can only be diagnosed after death.
According to the New York Times, there’s a “tremendous amount of selection bias” in the study since the brains of former NFL players often donated by their families because they showed signs of CTE. Still, the findings strongly show it’s more prevalent among professional football players than the general population.
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