Nearly 1 in 4 NFL Players Who Died Had CTE, New Study Finds
· Vice
Be fortunate that you more than likely do not have to be tackled by a 300-pound lineman at full speed to earn your paycheck; otherwise, it would be severely damaging your brain. Chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, as we more commonly refer to it, is a degenerative brain disease associated with repeated head trauma. A new damning study reported by the New York Times and published in the British Medical Journal found that at least 24.5 percent of NFL players who died between 2016 and 2021 were sufferers.
All told, the researchers examined 1,712 former players who died between 2008 and 2021. Of the 338 who donated their brains, 315 (93.2 percent) had CTE. The number is impossible to turn into an exact percentage of all former players because CTE can only be definitively diagnosed after death, and most of the brains were never examined.
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The study also found that dementia was common among the brain donors, particularly those with the most severe form of CTE. Nearly 60 percent of donors had been diagnosed with dementia, and about 90 percent of players with Stage IV CTE had it. A lot of the dementia cases were missing from death certificates.
Hundreds of Former NFL Players Had CTE, New Study Finds
One thing to keep in mind here is that players who donate their brains to study CTE are doing it because they likely experienced neurological problems, making them more likely to donate their brains for study upon death, so these results can’t be applied to every NFL player who’s ever lived.
The evidence is getting harder to ignore. The human brain was not designed to withstand constant blows without some lasting damage. The NFL has introduced a series of measures intended to reduce head impacts and concussions, like Halo helmets that add an additional layer of padding atop a traditional helmet. But the researchers say that preventing CTE may require reducing the amount of direct hits to the head a player receives in the first place, an act that seems inseparable from the game itself without radically altering the sport as we know it today.
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