110 N.F.L. Brains
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
> The set of players posthumously tested by Dr. McKee is far from a random sample of N.F.L. retirees. “There’s a tremendous selection bias,” she has cautioned, noting that many families have donated brains specifically because the former player showed symptoms of C.T.E.
This is equivalent to finding NFL players who showed signs of cancer, and then testing them for cancer. Of course you're going to get a rate close to 100%. The article takes 10 paragraphs before pointing out that the rate of CTE among former NFL players is much lower.
This sort of sloppy journalism is counterproductive. It makes it much easier for football fans to discredit and ignore the problem. At best, it causes people to endorse good policies for bad reasons.
"About 1,300 former players have died since the B.U. group began examining brains. So even if every one of the other 1,200 players had tested negative — which even the heartiest skeptics would agree could not possibly be the case — the minimum C.T.E. prevalence would be close to 9 percent, vastly higher than in the general population."
They're being honest about the selection bias, but they're saying the absolute minimum threshold is 9%. That's high number one, and it's almost certainly much higher than nine percent because they only tested a few of the brains. 1300 is every former pro player that died. Not every one they tested.
> A neuropathologist has examined the brains of 111 N.F.L. players — and 110 were found to have C.T.E.
It's incredibly disingenuous to lead with that. It makes readers think that the rate of CTE is almost 100%. Readers have to get through nine more paragraphs (including profiles of two NFL players) before the truth shows up. Yes, NFL players have absurdly high rates of CTE compared to the general population. Nobody in this thread is saying otherwise. But disingenuity makes your side easier to dismiss and discredit, even if it's right. That's why I criticized the article.
Boyoga!
Except for NFL players.
I'm honestly puzzled at the people coming out of the woodwork to troll this post. What is driving these people and their abandonment of reason?
It's bad for you in general. I used to go a gym with some ex-NFL guys, and they literally could barely move most days. All of them told me they would never let their kids play football. Every single one had life long lasting ailments, and none of them were the guys who made millions.
The problem is not so much the NFL IMO, it's the 4 years of collage + 1-4 years of high school before that. Means most people get hurt without any real benefit.
My research suggests that the minimum salary first hit $50k/year nominally in 1988 (which is $100k/year inflation-adjusted). The minimum salary has always been at least $60k/year inflation-adjusted since the first collective bargaining agreement in 1968.
But suffice it to say that, surprisingly, AFAICT for even exceptionally heavy occupational exposure (e.g. mining asbestos or removing asbestos insulation) lifetime risks of developing mesothelioma seem to be well below 10%, and possibly even below 1%.
Also, there are several kinds of asbestos fibers (broadly serpentine and amphibole), and the most lethal kind seem to be present typically as only a small fraction. Which makes it harder to relate risk (typically in units of f/mL.yr of a specific fiber type) to occupational exposures (often, AFAICT, in units of f/mL.yr of mixed fibers).
I suppose some of the horror stories about insane cancer incidences are from areas with peculiar asbestos deposits. Most of these studies I found were looking at averages of various cohorts (based on occupation, mix of fiber, etc), so wouldn't reflect those peculiar environments. Which I think is fair when comparing to CTE, otherwise you can cherry pick to exaggerate or minimize the relative harm of CTE. Ultimately there's a limit to the comparison.
But be skeptical. I'm gleaning this from some some quick Google searches and a superficial parsing of research papers, trying to create a 10,000' picture from claims and statements that are couched in very specific and narrow terms.
The subtext was, "even asbestos removal has a lower risk of health problems than football".
But I think that comparison may be confounded by the fact that the modern asbestos removal profession is organized around safety. In other words, that asbestos removal is not a good comparison point for high-risk professions.
I'll note that the "lifetime risk" numbers in the first response are almost certainly historical. I'd expect the studies he's looking to have been published around the time modern handling standards were developed, and they may have even contributed to their implementation. The symptoms also take decades to manifest, so I'd expect modern rates to be good indicators of the safety of the industry circa 20-30 years ago and nearly useless for indicating modern standards. 50 years ago probably not, but 20 years is probably still good.
It's fine to inform someone of the risks. An informed society is better than a society that doesn't let you play football.
I could inform you that you'll die 1/6 times you play russian roulette, but that doesn't mean that it should be ethically sound (or legal) to pay you to take that chance.
It may be unethical to play russian roulette, but is it still unethical to choose to play if you were paid $8.3 million (given that much worth in utility) first? Why not?
On the other hand, mining for minerals also has risk. Miners in Australia are highly compensated for it, getting paid over $100,000 per year.
What difference is there between the scenarios, assuming everyone involved is fully informed?
If I don't take the opportunity to work in Australian mines, will I have a reasonable opportunity to find work and provide a comfortable living for my family?
If that answer would change whether or not I'd work in a mine, I'd consider that the work may be exploitative of a regional work shortage. At that point someone might feel as though sacrificing their health is their only option, and an informed decision is much harder to make.
Like many ethical questions, it warrants discussion even though there may not be a "right" answer either way.
Nothing is unacceptable. Except faulty generalizations like the above.
An informed society is better than a society that doesn't let you play football.
Is anyone here saying we shouldn't "let" people play football?
That's a bad comparison. You don't just get a little bit of cancer. You get it or you don't and when it gets caught is what matters. Cognitive decline is not binary like that.
With asbestos it depends on how much exposure, how often and how long. PPE for use with high temperatures used to be asbestos before that was a liability. You don't see "served in an artillery unit in 'nam" on the TV commercials for the lawyers who litigate that stuff because only occasionally wearing asbestos gloves as part of your day job for a few years isn't a big deal. The same goes for doing brake jobs on your own vehicles since the '60s. It's not enough exposure. The advice for people who find it in their houses is to make sure it's not getting disturbed. Low levels of exposure = low risk. Sure, you can come up with an average decrease in life expectancy per some amount of exposure (this is popular with cigarettes) but it's not very meaningful when the result of the exposure to asbestos is a coin toss with worse odds years down the line.
Regardless, I'd take a slow death from age 45 to 65 if it meant that my family shot to the top of the economic ladder over the course of my career. Unless you really, really screw up wealth doesn't go away between generations.
* Selling cigarettes to children
* Building buildings that burn to the ground with everyone trapped inside
* Murder
So... I guess that America isn't a free country? If everyone was a perfectly informed perfectly rational expectation maximizer we wouldn't have any of these problems. But since none of those things are true, there're all sorts of predatory and greedy-counterproductive practices that are, yes, unacceptable, things that we have to ban for our civilization to continue to improve. I submit that american football, in its current form, is likely one of them. Too much glamour, too much money, too much tradition, too good at messing with people's heads, both in the way it sucks everyone into it (high school football!) and with the brain damage thing.
Meanwhile there are plenty of dangerous occupations, truck drivers, for example, that are not deemed unacceptable and banned by authoritarian morality police.
> If everyone was a perfectly informed perfectly rational expectation maximizer we wouldn't have any of these problems
This standard is hardly necessary. All that is necessary is to have sufficient information to take responsibility for decisions you make and their consequences. That is known as agency. Of course it's different if your decisions affect others. I could certainly see holding certain people or organizations (like the NFL) responsible if there has been some kind of cover-up about the long-term effects of concussions. But that's far different from a crude authoritarian ban.
> I submit that american football, in its current form, is likely one of them. Too much glamour, too much money, too much tradition, too good at messing with people's heads, both in the way it sucks everyone into it (high school football!) and with the brain damage thing.
In other words, you don't like football and you don't like the tradition, so you see no problem banning it. For you there's no downside, only upside.
No, banning is not necessary, at least not some kind of national ban issued from on high. It starts with education. Parents stop letting their children play Pop Warner. High schoolers in most of the country decide not to take the risks of playing football. HS football programs decline. College recruiting pools dry up, leading to a decline in the quality and popularity of College football. From there, it's anyone's guess how the NFL will survive.
Sure, it won't happen overnight. But I can assure you that the consequences of trying to issue an overnight ban of the most popular sport in the US would not be pretty.
I've seen plenty of articles headlined with something along the line of "should my kid play football?" If you knew your kid would have a 10% chance of developing CTE by playing the sport... well, I would think many parents would pause and reconsider. Certainly I would.
It's still a free country. Football is nowhere near the state of being "banned" or anything close to that. Plenty of other sports with probable worse concussion issues are also popular (see: MMA)
American football's huge prominence merely puts a bigger spotlight on this issue. In my opinion, the most likely outcome is equipment and/or rules changes. American football has changed rules and/or mandated equipment in the name of safety before.
That concept is just marketing or propaganda, depending on who is pushing it.
Also, let's not forget that there's accusations of a cover up by the NFL.
For example, it would be great if there was a short message before each game is aired that said "the sport you are about to watch is know to cause X in players. X is an extremely painful and debilitating condition." Then play a short clip of patients suffering from X.
Similarly, anyone who wants to become a player should be required to watch such a video educating them about the risks.
It doesn't actually contribute to the discussion, it just derails it. "free country" is too vague to be meaningful; we have our freedoms curtailed in big and small ways all day every day. Wanna test this? Go ignore traffic lights. Go walk into someone else's house. Traffic laws and property rights are acceptable constraints on freedom, but they are still constraints on freedom.
Please, if you're going to contribute, make it a useful contribution.
You did not quote my post in its entirety. Before the saying anything about the US being a free country, I asked a pointed, important question that the parent had left undefined. The OP glibly asserted that this was "unacceptable." I asked: "unacceptable to whom?" The glib question about US being a free country was rhetorical and intended to provide some context for interpreting the first, more important question.
In retrospect, I probably should have left it off, given that only one of six responses even attempted to address the more important question. It's no surprise that soundwave106's comment is far and away the most thoughtful and interesting response. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14851330.) I intended the 1st question to be literal and the 2nd question to be rhetorical. Instead everyone appears to have read the 2nd question to be literal and the 1st one to be rhetorical.
For a more detailed version of my own thoughts on the matter, feel free to review this follow-up: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14851549
Did it when the people being impacted by CTE today played?
I think most people overestimate the career earnings of the average football player and especially don't discount for the dramatic increase in pay that happened in the last 20 years?
There's a difference between "you might die right in the middle of this very fun activity" and "you might die slowly and horribly years from now when you're retired and in the midst of raising a family."
I ski pretty aggressively, and of course I might die doing that. But every day I go home and know, "well it wasn't today! Today was just great clean fun." If I had a nagging thought of "but today might give me a mental disorder in 20 years" then I'd be much less inclined to participate in the sport.
http://highline.huffingtonpost.com/articles/en/nfl-football-...
In football, as in boxing, the original investigation began because head trauma is obvious, but as the study broadened some of the worst cases of CTE were actually offensive linesmen. These are generally not the players who dish or receive hard hits, and many had never had a suspected concussion in their career. That led to the dominant theory that it isn't concussions -- the big hits -- that are the main cause of CTE, but instead many small traumas (in that case the o-line engaging with the d-line) that add up to CTE.
There is every reason to suspect that many other sports yield these sorts of recurring sub trauma, and aggressive skiing seems a probable candidate [edit - note that it does not require that you hit your head, have an accident, etc. If enough of a high-G event is transmitted to the brain, that can be a subconcussion]. It just isn't terribly common to do an intensive brain study of people after death to find these correlations.
I think there's a fair distinction to be drawn between sports that might cause head trauma if you make a mistake, and sports in which head trauma is practically the defining characteristic (see also: boxing). I am three weeks away from having a son, and while I've got some years, I'll eventually have to make some decisions about what activities I want to encourage and discourage. It at least seems possible to learn to ski without repeatedly bashing your head. Not so for football.
I ski and snowboard and I'm not planning on stopping, I think the benefits outweigh the risks. I'd say that about most sports but I'm not about to let either of my kids play football or box.
We need to study this stuff a lot more.
Again, someone studied football players because the impact is obvious. As it reaches out, players in even relatively low-g sports like soccer are being found with CTE.
And the part of soccer that seems to cause concern is heading the ball, not the running around part.
Comparing helmet to helmet impacts to skiing over rough terrain feels like a real stretch here.
But we don't know what the concern is in soccer. Heading is immediately looked at because it's an impact, but the actual cause may be something altogether different.
I mentioned the g forces measured in skiing elsewhere. They are absolutely in the range of subconcussion.
We evolved to walk with a limited brain suspension that just wasn't adapted for 100kph wax shoe runs.
If you're skiing at the level I'm talking about, falls are probably not that frequent, though.
In my earlier comment I was talking more about the explosive vertical compression-expansion cycle that characterizes skiing really hard with very tight turns on short radius skis. Those are much less violent than hitting a lineman though.
Where are you skiing that results in you receiving repeated blows to your head?
The comparison doesn't hold up at all, and OP's original point still stands against yours.
When you have a number of HN commenters correcting you, it's not them it's you.
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2995699/
[2] http://www.uwhealth.org/sports-medicine/clinic/concussion/11...
He's had a charmed life. Lots of great experiences, like a real-life Tom Sawyer or Huck Finn, and the stories to go along with them.
Now's he battling (and losing) with the late-stage effects of dozens of concussions, which is manifesting itself as severe short-term memory loss, increasingly poor long-term recall, and eventually the inevitable situation where he doesn't recognize his own children, only grandchild, and only great grandchild. My father also played football most of his life (but not at the same level), and I'm concerned the same thing will eventually happen to him.
I'm very thankful to have had my grandfather in my life for so long (I'm now 37), and I have so many really wonderful memories and experiences that I can attribute to him (sitting in the cockpit of a 727 as a toddler, flying in the family little Piper Cub, countless lovely tailgate parties, a huge loving extended family of his long-time friends, etc), and I want to make sure that in the short window that's left where he's able to be at-least present in the moment that myself and my young son spend ample time with him.
It's difficult to watch the decline, but I can't imagine how difficult it must be for him to be living it.
The point being, from what I've seen on the subject, there's no way to diagnose CTE until the patient has passed away and you can slice open their brain. It's possible that your grandfather's symptoms are related to his concussions, but it's also very possible that it would have happened anyways. CTE usually manifests 8-10 years after these brain injuries and has a lot of symptoms beyond the dementia you list, so it could be garden-variety Alzheimers.
Regardless, you have my sympathies. Alzheimers-type dementia is truly a terrible way to lose a loved one. The anti-climactic nature of it makes it really difficult to get closure in the way that you do when someone's death is more abrupt. Instead, they slowly fade away in the "boiled frog" fashion and you're left at whatever funeral you end up having realizing that they died a long time before their body expired and you never got to grieve. Be sure that you're intentional in remembering the person he used to be and don't let the empty shell of a person that exists now replace that in your memory. I didn't do that enough and it made grieving for my grandmother very difficult.
If there's a silver lining to my story, my mother is now past the age when her mother was diagnosed with Alzheimers and is, thus far, not showing signs of the disease. Given some of the research that's tying Alzheimers to particulate air pollution, I'm hopeful that the strides made by the EPA and others in reducing our air pollution will mean that she won't have to go through that ordeal and I won't have to lose her the way I lost my grandmother. If your dad is more than a decade past his football-playing days and symptoms haven't shown up, there's a good chance that he won't either.
Senile dementia, Alzheimers, brain cancers, and TBI frighten me even more than being flung 100m across the pavement in an automobile accident, or getting dragged into the gap by a commuter train. With those, you know you're dead, and so does everyone else. When you slowly lose your mind, no one can ever really be sure when you stopped being you, not even yourself.
The article implies a selection bias -- that the actual number of football players with CTE could be as low as 9%. It also notes cases where CTE effects really become "horrible" much later in life, for men who are older than the guys you list.
Guys who self-select to be television personalities also might have a lower incidence of CTE. There's also a chance that some odd behavior on TV will be interpreted as "quirky" or "goofy" and not "experiencing brain damage."
At any rate... Of course the answer is: No, not everyone with CTE dies "horribly." But it's seeming increasingly likely that CTE can have major unexpected consequences on the later lives of football players. And the worst case scenario of CTE (Junior Seau, Jovan Belcher) is exceptionally horrible and exceptionally tragic.
Which is still disgustingly high.
This study showed that 110 of 111 players tested had CTE. But many of their families consented because they suspected CTE already, so it's not a random sample and therefore you can't generalize that to the rest of the population. 110 is 9% of the population of 1300 deceased players for the given time period. CTE is normally extremely rare.
I don't think that it's fair to look at these former players that go into broadcasting and "diagnose" them in anyway. We don't see inside the private lives of these guys and we don't know what struggles they may or may not live with everyday.
What I don't understand is what that means exactly. Are there degrees of CTE? Might some of these players have CTE but hardly ever show much of a symptom in their lives? Or is everyone, as the people who I was responding to suggested, doomed to some sort of dementia where they forget who they are their families are? And if that's the case, shouldn't we see this more often among ex-players who are still in the public? Or are the former players who take these jobs all in the 10% that don't get CTE? Just trying to make sense of the conflicting data here.
Of course the problem is that you can go half a life time doing this thing, and then it sneaks up on you and there's no reversing the damage. The danger isn't presented as clear or present as with anti-smoking messaging, or with something like solo free climbing which needs no warning.
Maybe you'd rather your kid play football or learn boxing than lay on the couch. If the risk is 10x that of baseball, and 50x that of track and field, however, you might steer them to different activities.
That's interesting because the accidental insurance (that I took out during the football years) had separate premiums for skiers and snowboarders. The most serious concussion that I ever got was from snowboarding.
> There's a difference between "you might die right in the middle of this very fun activity" and "you might die slowly and horribly years from now when you're retired and in the midst of raising a family."
It's kinda arbitrary to draw these lines of "my dangerous sport is superior to your dangerous sport." It's all risks and benefits. Skiing/snowboarding is pretty dangerous for catastrophic accidents AND it still has a high concussion rate.
0.37 = American football concussion rate per 1,000 athletic exposures
0.2 = Skiing/snowboarding closed head injury rate per 1,000 mountain visits
You're not incredibly far behind football in terms of risk, my friend.
what if you were paid millions of dollars to do it and treated as a living god? i think a lot of people would still take that deal even knowing the risks.
Good clean fun that has erased quite a bit of usable life from your knees. Better than a brain injury, but not great.
brain injuries and knee injuries are not really comparable.
I have so much appreciation for people who have a good sense for design that is intuitive/effortless for the user. Especially in this case, when it means cutting the learning curve that a user experiences when they are presented with a bunch of new data.
It's hard to deal with
That being said, football is football. After seven seasons I knew my IQ had dropped some points. But if I could go back in time, I'd do it all over again. What I would give for just one more play. When people say football will eventually become this archaic sport because of the risks, I just laugh.
Head injury concerns are the single reason I am not playing right now. I've had a good run, but it's important to know when to stop and prioritize the latter half of your life.
I started playing football at 6 years old. Tackle football came about two years later. In my junior year of high school, my back problems and knee problems were so bad, I had to quit. It was the best day of my life. In recent years, I've become an ultrarunner and am generally very healthy.
I'm 41 now and about 5 years ago, I passed out after cutting my hand (vagal response to the sight of my blood) and suffered a 10 minute long seizure after passing out. So, I spent the next few days doing EEGs and MRIs on my noggin.
There was nothing definite but the neurologist noticed some lesions on my brain in various places. First thing he asks me, "Did you play football as a child?" I said yes, and he said, "You should have an MRI at least every 5 years to see if these things get any bigger."
Recently, my memory has gotten worse. I've found myself rocking or nodding my head for no discernible reason. Control over my lower legs is variable. As a runner, I'm fairly in tune with my body. I can tell that things are not going as they should.
Who knows if I'll get CTE (or some other neurological problem) and if I do, if it's related to the 10 years of football I played. What I do know is that this experience is not one I'd want my children to have when it's most decidedly not necessary.
All that to say that there might be a LOT of people like me in the US who never even got close to college football or the NFL that could potentially suffer this same fate.
It will change the dynamics but if you do something crazy to tackle someone, you too will get badly hurt.
The NYT piece notes that even if none of the other ~1,300 NFL players (who have since died since this research began) have brains affected by CTE, "the minimum C.T.E. prevalence would be close to 9 percent, vastly higher than in the general population.".
[1] https://opendata.stackexchange.com/questions/5875/get-season...
In football, at any given point and time there is one person with virtually a huge bullseye on them and it is sometimes a valid tactic to lay down a more punishing hit (cause a fumble, make a statement, scare your opponent to make a mistake or drop the ball next time, etc) at the expensive of not making a "secure, form tackle"
Ironically, if I am remembering correctly, the Seahawks and coach Pete Carroll teach more of a "rugby" style tackle, and that's why they consistently have one of the best tackling defenses.
Football is a game of inches. There is huge incentive to slam someone as hard as you can to stop their forward progress and ultimately deny the first down. There's incentive for the ball carrier fight for the inches and "fall forward" (which makes your head more vulnerable). In rugby you don't care about fighting for the inches and hell, your teammates will shove you down once they're set up to ruck over you. Fighting for inches in rugby is a quick way to start a maul and nobody wants a maul.
Furthermore, football is played with greater momentum (mass * velocity). Those breaks between plays equates to six seconds of full blown sprinting followed by forty seconds of rest. In rugby you're running about constantly so you simply don't have the energy most of the time for those massive hits. As for the mass side of the equation, football players are on average bigger than ruggers.
People think rugby is so hardcore for playing without pads (and it still is) but the hardest hits I ever took were in football (and I played defense, for goodness sakes). This is the consensus between everyone I've met that's played both. You can play multiple rugby games in a weekend (happens all the time at fests) but more than one football game a week is unsustainable.
In my experience it makes my head a larger target than I'm used to, plus it affects my peripheral vision, making me take more shots to the head than I would have otherwise.
Plus, put on some headgear, let me punch you, and tell me how cushioned you felt.
Also, the worst part of the headgear, in my opinion, is I find it way harder to breath when it's on and I can confirm that I've felt punch drunk up to an hour or two after catching a bad direct hit while sparing with headgear.
Also you dont have these monsters continually running full speed and colliding to make blocks because blocking is also illegal in rugby.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gladiator#Victory_and_defeat
Moreover I think it's offensive to imply football is this caste regime as if the rich people are watching the poor people play. Football pervades all income levels. Your rich prep high schools still have a football team. Ivy league schools still have football teams. If anything it is an equalizer because your rich suburban prep school guy lines up next to a dude that grew up in the inner city all the same. And their standing in the team, along with compensation, will be dependent on their performance as opposed to race or economic background. Where else in society is there this level of parity?
First, NCAA and NFL is composed of a range of races and economic backgrounds. Your third-generation legacy QB is getting sacked all the same as your QB from the projects. And the rich white patrons don't care either way.
Fact #1: Most NFL players are black. Fact #2: Most NFL owners are white.
Does this speak more about systemic issues at the player level, or the owner level? I'd say the owner level. There is no lack of white athletes trying to make it into college and pro ball. I don't think recruiters are recruiting a disproportionately high amount of black players compared to white players because they want to spare the white race from long-term injuries. They're just picking the best athletes. In contrast, it's easy to explain why there are less black NFL team owners.
Secondly, I'm a bit confused as to why "poor" seems to be equated with "black" in your scenario. Yeah, we can easily look at NCAA players on TV and visually confirm that over 50% are black. But how do you know what percentage of players is poor? There are lots of poor rural white kids in the NCAA. There are lots of suburban middle class black kids. And by the time you're playing in the NFL, no one is poor.
The trauma of repetitive blows to the head triggers degeneration in brain tissue, including the buildup of an abnormal protein called tau. Thin slices of tissue are dyed and the tau shows up as these darker areas.
(They don't say so, but 110 of 111 were diagnosed, and if the only brain tested without it was the punter I can't imagine them not emphasizing that. I don't think this conflicts with the family's request to not identify the player.)
Presumably there is some sort of way to quantify the extent of disease besides yes/no. I'd really like to see the the extent vs. player position. Is there a write up for this, or was it a direct to NY Times deal?
Look, football is a violent sport, and it's certainly plausible that this induces a chronic, difficult-to-detect but serious disease over years of playing, and that the organization making billions from it would fight against that conclusion. But it's hard to square the smugness and outrage in this thread with the observation that NFL players have a lower rate of all-cause mortality than the general population.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/09/sports/football/nfl-player...
Obviously that's consistent with the NFL having a significant net-negative impact on the health of athletes, who are a special sub-population that is likely to be of above-average health. (Although note that the average body weight of their pool is also very high, which would almost assuredly still be true even if they hadn't played, and that increases baseline death rates from things like heart disease.) And that impact could be so negative as to outweigh the benefits of playing, possibly necessitating rule changes, compensation, etc. But there is no ghastly epidemic of NFL players dying by the droves.
I don't think there's been a neurological performance test of retired players, but one will probably be done and I'm willing to bet that NFL players again do better than the general population (which, again, does not mean that playing in the NFL doesn't make you dumber). Anyone want to bet against me?
http://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2645104
Incredibly, they list the number of each position type who have mild and severe CTE (their only degree of gradation) but apparently don't list the total number of players at each position, and hence I can't tell how many brains didn't have CTE by position. Nonetheless, we can confirm that both the punter and placekicker were diagnosed with mild CTE (a placekicker!) and the severe:mild ratio was higher among quarterbacks than lineman (11:2 for QBs vs. 29:8 and 27:8 for offensive and defensive linemen respectively).
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2016/1...
http://www.cnn.com/2017/02/01/health/soccer-headers-concussi...
Swimming is also relatively safe. Distance running might result in repetitive stress injury, but it won't kill you.
Slow-pitch softball eliminates most of the risks from baseball. Hit by pitch and RSI from pitching are the dangers there.
Cycling removes some of the RSI risk from distance running, but replaces it with higher-speed impacts, usually into hard surfaces.
Edit: It depends on your definition of "team sport", really. If you define it such that you can't meaningfully separate out any individual performances, you're cutting out all relay-type competitions from the start. If you say archery is not a team sport, then neither is a swimming relay race. Where do you draw the line? What's the minimum number of participants that have to work together to qualify as a team?
Of the youth sports I'm involved with flag football and baseball are the two safest (especially if you're not a pitcher). Then basketball sits in the middle as pretty safe. The main worry in basketball is running into someone going for the ball. I'd put soccer and tackle football as the most dangerous (tackle football being more dangerous). If they eliminate heading out of youth soccer, it would move it into the basketball level of safety.
I'm not sure there is any way to change tackle football to make it reasonably safe for kids.
Crew, tennis, baseball, swimming, golf, all of track and field, etc.
Washington Post: 14 men participating in the study. Each was asked to perform a rotational header — redirecting the soccer ball — 20 consecutive times during 10-minute sessions.
tiny sample size + 20 consecutive headers in 10 minutes is astronomically rare occurrence in soccer, 3 headers in 10 minutes is incredibly rare. Even with this methodology they report *the alterations appeared to clear within 24 hours.
CNN: "Concussions in soccer mostly occur from player-to-player and player-to-ground contact. Heading is involved in only 15% to 25% of concussions in soccer, and most of those are a result of poorly executed headers where two players hit heads,"
So most concussions are from bumping heads, which is a possibility in any contact sport.
For what it's worth, this is a completely reasonable number. In a game situation, sure, headers aren't that common. But during my youth soccer days, we practiced at least twice as often as we played and practice with headers was quite common. Ironically, they were trying to teach us the proper technique so that we wouldn't hurt ourselves. I can easily imagine practice sessions in which we headed the ball at least 3 times as often as that 20 per 10 min number.
Honest question, bc at the end of the day, beyond all scientific studies, it is parents who will define which sports are popular and actually played.
I gave up youth soccer after a season or two at least partly because heading hurts.
Essentially, it's not even close to a representative sample of former NFL players.
It would be the same as people who had knee problems, then were found to have arthritis in their knees after an autopsy.
I would be very careful to say that all (or almost all) NFL players will have CTE when they finish football.
I have seen more research on people's brains where they categorize them in two types, ones that recover from brain trauma and others that don't. For me, that seems more likely.
If you are an NFL player with the type of brain that recovers well, you probably will be fine later in life. If you have a brain that just doesn't seem to do well with that, then you could develop CTE. That would be my guess.
The authors are playing to a theme here, rather than objectively reporting results.
[1] http://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2645104
i also think players are too big today, more weight at higher velocities only makes things worse for the head. the only reasonable thing I can think of is a 'salary cap' based on player weight as well.
In many sports, people face death itself, and pay the ultimate price for competing. CTE, while made plain by studies such as this, might only change youth and amateur level competition. Professional leagues will probably continue apace, even amid full disclosure of well-known hazards.
This particular hazard wasn't previously well understod, but now it is, so, like boxing, it's still an improvement to the sport, to have players enter competition properly informed of the risks they are undertaking, so that they understand the choice they are making when they decide to play this game.
tl;dr The point of any given sport is usually to step into harms way, on some level, in a controlled arena and to test your abilities against other people in a contest of skill and endurance. That's how this works.
As long as there are poor people with some athletic ability and fans willing to watch them, there will be grid iron football players.
Today it is confined to a niche professionally and is almost totally absent from most youth sport systems.
I know MMA fans might take exception but I think I'd lump them in with boxing fans of the past. Maybe there is some clear delimiter between MMA fans and boxing fan of the past; I can't think what it would be though.
Lots of the kids MMA events don't even allow head strikes and especially not the particularly dangerous elbow strikes while on the ground.
Boxing makes it hard to have that distinction. My prediction is that MMA will also go through this when people start realizing that the head trauma stuff is nearly as bad in MMA as boxing.
You don't see a direction link between the grassroots levels to the pro level? If you kill the interest, or participation at the grassroots level, there will never be a compelling pro league to source from.
Good riddance to a lame game of consisting of mostly low skilled athletes
Yes, the trope is that football consists entirely of meatheads. The infamous movie The Blind Side comes to mind where they falsely treat Michael Oher like moron in spite of his capability does nothing to put this to rest. However there is a lot of strategy from the coach picking the play to the individual match-up right on the field.
And to say that it is low skill - that's just a plain insult. Find me a 6'5", 325 lbs person who can deftly keep someone of equal or larger size from encroaching upon the quarterback's territory. Find me an Average Joe capable of consistently catching passes against two defenders. Find me another Average Joe capable of ball placement when their receiver has two defenders guarding them.
Google shows some online Wonderlic tests if you'd like to find your own score. (I haven't tried any.)
But I will agree with you otherwise and say that the NFL has a strong incentive to dissuade youth, amateur, and semi-pro football players from adjusting their play to avoid CTE and dangerous play. The game is more physical now than ever, the players are bigger, they run faster, they hit harder, and that contributes to the popularity of the sport.
If the NFL can figure out a way to regulate dangerous hitting out of the game and preserve the appeal of the game, that would immediately trickle down to all levels and make the game safer.
>Good riddance to a lame game of consisting of mostly low skilled athletes
Having played up to college, it's tremendous fun and has roles for a range skillsets. While not necessarily very intelligent, everyone is very skilled.
As for the mental part there is so much crap going on on large parts of the field that you have to remember at a moment's notice.
Much of football at lower levels relys on tons of memorization but this is the argument I made to my o line coach:
"So every year we face around 4 standard defenses. We play carnagie which runs a oddball one and you have us defending the zone blitz as well because you think a team is going to use it. So that's 6 defenses. Every d lineman can shade at least 3 ways but let's just call that 12 and not go permutations and let's skip the line backers that also covers mirroring of the d. We run essentially 15 run plays each direction for the purposes of the linemen rembering and 10 special plays so 25 plays... And we run them both ways so 50.
So we have 61250 = 3600. So basically you want me to memorize, recognize and recall and use within 1/2 of a step's notice 3600 things with 2 weeks of practice.
And every week you throw in 3 special plays and sub optimizing changes because of special players which ends up being 200-1200 changes.
Do you see how that might be difficult?"
But this is what most places do till you get up higher. After teaching my coach permutations math I said:
"Can you just tell us for each play what is the most dangerous thing to it and specifics for that week? That's really only 50*3 things total and about 12 things extra a week."
Reply "so you want me to teach you to be coaches basically"?
Me: "we are at a top ten University who plays football against carnagie and University of Chicago... I think we can use our brains pretty well"
Anyway yes it requires a ton of mental. I did as much studying each season of football in college as I did to pass orgo 1&2.
As part of this thought exercise, let's take as a given that CTE doesn't exist and brain injuries are unimportant.
After that, let's look at the prevalence of diabetes, heart disease, and other long-term degenerative diseases in the NFL player population.
Then, let's look at the shortened earning potential of the NFL player. Yes, for a year, maybe more, they are highly paid but lifetime earnings might not be what you'd expect. How do the stresses of many men who leave the NFL with no skills and often an abandoned college degree affect them and their families?
Next, let's consider the lifestyle the NFL envisions for its fans. Spending at least a full day each week sitting and eating unhealthy food while consuming alcohol. Spend the rest of the week gambling on the outcomes of the games (or individual players). Much of the time, this fandom is done as a family leading to impacts on children in the home. There's a societal health impact here.
The list goes on if we follow this thinking. So, if we go back and remove our given, we end up with a spectacle that unduly endangers its participants, encourages unhealthy behavior in its fans, and indoctrinates our youth to be accepting of all the above. Meanwhile, a very few wealthy families get even wealthier on the backs of all that.
> Next, let's consider the lifestyle the NFL envisions for its fans. Spending at least a full day each week sitting and eating unhealthy food while consuming alcohol. Spend the rest of the week gambling on the outcomes of the games (or individual players). Much of the time, this fandom is done as a family leading to impacts on children in the home. There's a societal health impact here.
Won't somebody please think of the children! They might grow up to watch FOOTBALL!!
But, if one is seriously trying to determine sociological trends, these are the kinds of questions one must examine. It might be a similar line of thought, with different details, for the increased use of digital devices in our society.
Lastly, you're being facetious but their watching football might well be part of the problem. Without participants or an audience, the NFL ceases to exist thereby removing the negatives AND positives that its existence might create.
> The neuropathology of CTE is increasingly well defined. In 2013, McKee and colleagues published the largest case report to date of individuals with neuropathologically confirmed CTE, presenting proposed criteria for four stages of CTE pathology based on the severity of the findings [9••]. Formal validation of the reliability of these criteria and the staging system are currently being performed by a team of nine neuropathologists, funded by a National Institutes of Health (NIH)
"So even if every one of the other 1,200 players would have tested negative — which even the heartiest skeptics would agree could not possibly be the case — the minimum C.T.E. prevalence would be close to 9 percent, vastly higher than in the general population."
Where are you getting your information that estimates of CTE in the general population are low?
The idea that <9% of the general population at death have degenerative brain disease is highly implausible. Especially since we know AD has a prevalence which is multiples of 9%. Of course, I am not claiming CTE is not a problem in contact sports; merely that this headline is ridiculous. It's more important to estimate an odds ratio and confidence interval for the point estimate. My back of the envelope estimate for the OR would be ~3 (still concerning and large!).
There are related common problems in my field of biomedical research. I am a published author in Alzheimer disease, although it is no longer my primary focus. :)
(In fact, it's possible that all CTEs diagnosed in this report would be classified as purely dementia in the general population).
I also think the general population prevalence estimates for dementia are too low, for reasons not worth going into here.