I wonder if this has compounded the TBI and concussion issue over the years. I think sports medicine in general has gotten much better and the average player is probably bigger and stronger and thus able to hit harder than 20+ years ago...
I've experienced a severe traumatic brain injury (sTBI), meaning I've seen many brain doctors. I have seen a neuro-omptomolgist (brain-eye doctor) who sees a football player who can't even add up his checkbook (meaning he can't add, not this his checkbook is too complex). I had a therapist who dated a college football player and eventually saw him as more of a patient than a boyfriend.
A concussion is now defined as seeing bright spots[2] and is classified as a mild TBI. The results from concussions are cumulative[3], and football is one of the sports most prone to concussion[3]. A football block is defined as being good if you see bright spots or having a concussion, and players often play through this[4].
I'll never let my children play football.
[1]:http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/10/19/091019fa_fact_...
[2]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concussion
[3]:http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0140673675...
[4]:http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/11/05/dont-tell-coach-pla...
This horrifies me more than I can describe.
Your last sentence is out there though. We're talking about kids in college, no one has put a price on their intelligence yet. Also unnecessary to imply that football players wouldn't be able to do anything useful with their intelligence.
Coincidentally, I've worked with a former Pac-12 football player (who left the game after I think freshman year), and in fact I have sought out his opinions on optimizations for database wrappers (among other subjects). Beware of who you write off with your stereotypes!
I don't want to live in a society where people are told it's okay to have their bodies destroyed to get a living (or a scholarship) or to satisfy the market (for a prestigious football team that sell tickets). We shouldn't strive for that.
Ranting:
> Why can't one sell their the cognitive ability if they choose to? If the player is "smart" enough to cheat the test then ultimately it is their choice.
That's a catch-22. If they were smart, they wouldn't sell their cognitive ability.
> Society has deemed their muscles more valuable then their intelligence and I don't think we would be turning towards them for their thoughts on optimizations for database wrappers.
So when the economy isn't good we should sell our organs because society deemed our body parts more valuable than our well being ?
I wish more people had this attitude.
Me personally, I'd rather be the best at creating something.
The biggest thing for me is the aim of the sport. The aim of American football is to stop the opposing team using your body; soccer and hockey both involve pretty intense strategy to get the ball/puck in the net.
Hockey does have some body-body impact (through checks). I haven't played much hockey, so I don't know how severe it is.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/12/sports/footballs-risks-sin...
So please consider this when I say that those college guys were jacked up on 'roids' and WAAYY too big for me. I didn't take steroids in high school but I was big enough and strong enough (and in truth, angry enough) to play against those kids on 'roids anyway. I knew in college, I wouldn't have been.
I walked away from a certain Division I college scholarship (at the time - I blew out my knee a year later) despite what my coaches were calling a 'no-brainer' to play football. I've NEVER regretted it and each year that has passed since has made me even more glad I did it.
He basically said, "I don't know. Every year I go back to camp, the guys are bigger, stronger and hit harder than last year."
When you look around the league, it's obvious how much bigger these guys have gotten. Look at some of the current LA KINGS forwards:
Jeff Carter - 6'4" - 212lbs
Dwight King - 6'4" - 230lbs
Anze Kopitar - 6'3" - 224lbs
Jordan Nolan - 6'3" - 221lbs
I'm assuming their heights are all reflected without wearing skates, which adds a good 2" to those heights. This is one of the reasons many pundits said LA won the cup in 2011. Big, strong forwards and a merciless forecheck. I still remember one of the announcers saying, "Imagine you're a defensemen and everytime LA drops the puck into the corner in your end and you have two of these guys hurtling towards you as you go for the puck. It's a defensemen's worst nightmare."
Hockey also has the problem of players wearing body armor now so hits are even worse than what they used to be.
Women's soccer has a higher rate of concussions than men's football at the collegiate level, and it has 75% of the rate at the high school level [1]. Similarly, men's college soccer has a higher rate than high school football. In fact, football is higher than the average sport (high school or college) by less than a factor of 2, an average which includes non-contact sports like volleyball.
Will you be preventing your girls from playing soccer?
Yes, football has a somewhat higher rate of concussions than most other sports, a fact that should be considered before participating. And yes, the recent improvement in concussion treatment and monitoring is a great thing which will naturally focus on football since it has a higher concussion rate and since more US high schoolers play football than any other sport by far.
But the idea that football is in its own category of danger is ludicrous. If you're withholding your children from football, you should almost certainly be withholding them from all contact sports.
[1] Table 1 here: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2140075/
You're saying that Football (where hitting another player is illegal) is as dangerous as American Football, where hitting another player with the full weight of your body at high momentum is the point of the game for most positions.
Does not compute.
From the study you linked to:
> Contact with another person was the risk factor responsible for most concussions among high school athletes.
You could play an entire season of Football without ever coming into contact with another player. Unless you were a Marvel superhero, that wouldn't be possible in American Football.
I skimmed the study you linked to an the conclusion was merely that Football and American Football had the highest rates of concussion... compared to what... track and field athletics? DUH!!
Somebody ran a survey where they looked for replies that indicated "probable" concussions that were unreported, and they found
> The sports with the most unreported concussions were women’s soccer (24%), men’s football (21%), field hockey (13%), and cheerleading (10%).
http://www.sportsmedres.org/2014/02/unrecognized-concussion-...
I don't believe those numbers are normalized for the number of concussions, and in any case would indicate that women soccer players were slightly less likely than football players to report a concussion conditional on having one.
As for "unrecognized" concussions (i.e. the athlete gave a reply on the survey that sounded like maybe they had a concussion) they say
> The sports with highest potentially unrecognized concussions were football (55%), cheerleading (50%), and cross-country (28%).
which to me means you can't trust this survey at all. Whatever they're interpretting as an "unrecognized" concussion, it happens as often in cheerleading and over half as often in cross-country.
On the other hand, if you want a human interest piece, you can go read skierscott's link to the NYTimes blog post about how all those football players are toughing out brain damage....
Either you don't watch much Football, or you don't watch much American Football. One only needs to watch a few games of each to see how violent they are. American Football has dozens of people smashing into each other (often head-first) every minute of the game.
>A brain injury study conducted at the Boston University School of Medicine showed that 33 of 34 players tested post-mortem showed clear signs of CTE.[1]
Even when you account for selection bias the number of NFL players with CTE is insane.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_NFL_players_with_chroni...
"While it remains unknown what level of exposure to brain trauma is required to trigger CTE, there is no available evidence that occasional, isolated or well-managed concussions give rise to CTE," one of the study's co-authors, Dr. Robert Cantu, said in a press release.
So basically, you're just stuck with your priors on this one. As far as I am aware, CTE data doesn't provide you with any additional evidence for non-concussive effects beyond what you could have conjectured pre-CTE.
Of course, the media has breathlessly reported on how NFL players are all commiting CTE-induced suicide despite the fact that the NFL suicide rate is less than half the rate of the general population...
http://loyolamedicine.org/newswire/news/little-evidence-reti...
"there is no available evidence that occasional, isolated or well-managed concussions give rise to CTE,"
He said there was no evidence for occasional concussions, he didn't say anything about repeated non-concussive injuries.
Here's a quote from the BU CTE center
"We believe CTE is caused by repetitive brain trauma. This trauma includes both concussions that cause symptoms and subconcussive hits to the head that cause no symptoms." [1]
I'm a big guy and I live in the south, so you can bet I played my share of football growing up--there are definitely a lot more repeated hits to the head in football than any other popular youth sport.
The fact they're finding it in many other sports and in military personnel, as pointed out in the FAQ, makes me pretty skeptical that this is a disease strongly linked to nonconcussive hits since hockey players and soldiers aren't butting heads every day. But it's pretty hard to draw conclusions while the data and definitions are so vague. Do you know if they've looked specifically at populations of long-time football players with no concussions?
A review article from 2012 had this to say
> While it is clear that anyone who suffers repeated head trauma, regardless of the mechanism, may carry the risk of developing CTE, there is no clear consensus on how much or how little trauma is needed to cause CTE. While most feel CTE is a manifestation of repetitive trauma, the question still stands if it can be caused by a single TBI [10]. In a study by Johnson et al., widespread tau and beta-amyloid deposition was found in the brains of individuals who suffered a single traumatic brain injury. The study included the examination of postmortem brains from long-term survivors (1–47 years) of a single TBI () versus uninjured age-matched controls (). Results showed NFTs to be exceptionally rare in young uninjured controls, yet were abundant and diffuse in one-third of TBI cases.
http://www.hindawi.com/journals/rerp/2012/816069/
The last sentence seems to support the idea that the appearance of symptoms is an important threshold, but it's hard to tell what they mean; could also be that anyone cracking heads enough to get sub-concussive CTE are likely to have picked up at least one full concussion.
> I'm a big guy and I live in the south, so you can bet I played my share of football growing up--there are definitely a lot more repeated hits to the head in football than any other popular youth sport
I played 11 years of football, mostly on defense and mostly with my head, and I fully agree. I coach youth football, so any data that would show a dramatically higher risk for football than other sports (which are generally regarded as acceptably risky) is of great interest to me.
As I see it there are a variety of ways to become injured in sports: - traumatic injury such as concussion, spinal injury, torn ligaments, broken bones, etc. - repetitive stress injuries such as CTE, tendinitis, stress fractures, etc. - what I'll call body stress injuries. Things like putting on too much weight for your frame to play lineman in football, extreme weight dropping for weight class sports, or the extreme oddities professional cyclists put themselves through for an advantage.
Nearly every sport you play has some chance of having injuries in at least one of these categories. The problem is that football has a high likely hood of injuries in all of these categories, and at the worst case of the injury in the category.
Other people point out how 1 group seems to separate into 3. That 1 group had to be good at lots of different things, and while football was probably still a rough sport, there was no chasing of extremes.
There was an awesome blog post about the '70s-era Broad Street Bullies and how "soft" they look if you're used to today's NHL: http://www.mc79hockey.com/2014/05/the-broad-street-bullies-w...