It is maybe not particularly unexpected that after experiencing decades of head-to-head collisions on the football pitch, many NFL veterans spend their retirements dealing with deteriorating brain health because they are forced to deal with concussions and other neurological issues. The vast majority of former National Football League players (92 percent) have been shown to suffer from chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE). Concerningly, however, the results of a new study conducted by the CTE Centre at Boston University reveal that people of all ages, not just crusty old veterans, ought to be worried about the degenerative brain illness. In spite of the fact that their playing careers are often shorter and less publicised, the researchers discovered that young amateur athletes who participate in some of the most physically demanding contact sports also appear to be at danger.
After conducting autopsies on the brains of 152 people who had participated in contact sports and died before the age of 30, researchers found that 41.4 percent of the deceased had symptoms of CTE. More than seventy percent of individuals who were diagnosed had been amateur athletes in the past and had participated in sports such as football, ice hockey, soccer, rugby and wrestling. Another participant in the study was the first female athlete in the United States to be diagnosed with CTE. She was a 28-year-old NCAA football player, and her identity has been withheld. The findings were reported in the journal JAMA Neurology.
“It seems to be well accepted now that you can play at a very high level of elite American football or ice hockey and get CTE,” says Ann McKee, head of the BU CTE Centre. “It seems to be well accepted now that you can get CTE.” But the first signs of this disease are showing up in young people who were predominantly involved in amateur sports.
The most recent findings provide a difficult conundrum for parents. Sports are essential for children and teenagers because they get them moving, keep them socialising, and teach them a variety of life skills. This is true whether the sport involves a lot of physical contact, as in ice hockey, or relatively little, as in basketball. Is it really worthwhile to participate in particular sports if doing so puts a child’s developing brain at a greater risk of suffering from irreversible and life-altering damage?
CTE Presents Itself in Childhood; Head Injuries May Lead to Depression
The researchers started off by analysing brain samples to look for indications of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), which is characterised by an abnormal accumulation of a protein known as tau, as well as indicators of damage to white matter and other types of brain tissue. All of the samples were taken from the UNITE Brain Bank, which is managed in collaboration with the United States Department of Veterans Affairs and the Concussion Legacy Foundation. This bank houses a collection of more than 1,400 brains that were donated for scientific research following the donor’s death.
The results of that neuropathologic study revealed that the majority of the athletes diagnosed with CTE were in the disease’s early, mild stage, while only a tiny number, three, had progressed to the third stage of the disease’s four phases. (Another recent study conducted at the BU CTE Centre found that playing tackle football at a young age was associated with a loss in brain function later in life.) At this time, CTE can only be identified after a person has passed away.
Even if the sportsmen did not have CTE, the researchers found that the majority of them suffered from clinical symptoms during the brief time that they were alive. This was determined by the researchers through in-depth interviews with the family of the donors. Over seventy percent of them suffered from apathy, and a comparable proportion struggled with depression. Furthermore, over fifty percent of them struggled to maintain control over their behaviour, and many of them struggled with substance abuse as well.
McKee, a professor of neurology and pathology at the BU Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine, is also the chief of neuropathology at the VA Boston Healthcare System. He is a William Fairfield Warren Distinguished Professor. “Those symptoms might be a result of the head injury itself,” McKee adds. According to the findings of the study, some of the symptoms that these young athletes are reporting are not due to the early tau pathology that is associated with CTE. The blows to the head themselves could induce damage to the white matter as well as vascular injury, which would result in a breach of the blood-brain barrier.
The conclusion that she and her colleagues came to was that even just a couple of additional years of experience on the pitch made a significant difference. Those who were diagnosed with CTE had an average playing career that was 3.8 years longer than those who did not have the condition.
The UNITE Brain Bank primarily accepts donations from individuals who have been concerned about their brain health throughout their lives. The study did not include any samples from young people who participated in sports that did not involve physical contact. According to McKee, it is shocking how many cases of CTE have been documented in young people who participate in contact sports when compared to the general population.
According to McKee, “this study demonstrates very clearly that the pathology of CTE starts early.” It is astonishing that more than forty percent of young contact and collision sport athletes in the UNITE Brain Bank have CTE, especially when one considers that research conducted on community brain banks indicate that less than one percent of the general population has CTE.
