40 percent of former NFL players suffer from brain injuries, new study shows

[tsylvester]

I am not surprised and I suppose this could have gone in any one of the retired young players thread, but I thought it deserved its own thread. I would really like to see them test people who played sports throughout their lives but never at the NFL level. Those who have had concussions from anything, to see if they can determine how many it will take until these sysptoms, this disease, takes hold.

 

 

A study that will be presented at next week’s American Academy of Neurology (AAN) meeting offers one of the most conclusive pieces of evidence yet of a definitive link between brain injury and playing football.

It shows that “more than 40 percent of retired National Football League players … had signs of traumatic brain injury based on sensitive MRI scans called diffusion tensor imaging,” according to a press release from the AAN.

 

This isn’t the first study of its kind. Last year Frontline reported that researchers with the Department of Veterans Affairs and Boston University found chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), which the Mayo Clinic defines as “brain degeneration likely caused by repeated head traumas” that is “a diagnosis only made at autopsy,” in 96 percent of the NFL players they examined and in 79 percent of football players at various levels of play.

The researchers studied 165 deceased people who had played the sport in high school, college or professionally, and found evidence of CTE in 131 of them.

But this newest study is “one of the largest studies to date in living retired NFL players” and the “first to demonstrate significant objective evidence for traumatic brain injury in these former players,” study author Dr. Francis X. Conidi of the Florida Center for Headache and Sports Neurology and Florida State University College of Medicine said in the release.“The rate of traumatic brain injury was significantly higher in the players than that found in the general population,” Conidi said in the release.

 

 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2016/04/12/40-percent-of-former-nfl-players-suffer-from-brain-damage-new-study-shows/