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Post by mikecubs on Sept 29, 2017 21:26:40 GMT -6
Breakthrough may lead to ability to diagnose CTE in living football players
In one of the biggest breakthroughs to date, researchers from Boston University School of Medicine have discovered a key biomarker for chronic traumatic encephalopathy that they hope marks the first step toward being able to diagnose and ultimately treat the neurodegenerative disease in a living football player. Dr. Ann McKee, the neuropathologist credited with some of the most high-profile CTE diagnoses, said she was buoyed by the recent discovery, calling it “the first ray of hope” in a years-long effort to understand the disease. “To me, it feels like maybe now we can start going in the other direction,” she said. “We’ve been going down, and everything has just gotten more and more depressing. And now it’s like, ‘Yeah, we’re going to actually find some answers here.’” In a new study published Tuesday in the journal PLOS ONE, researchers from BU and the VA Boston Healthcare System studied the brains of 23 former football players who were diagnosed with CTE, in addition to those of 50 non-athletes who suffered from Alzheimer’s disease and 18 non-athlete controls. They found significantly elevated levels of a protein related to inflammation called CCL11 in the group of ex-players compared with the non-athletes. The levels were even higher in those who played the game longer.She cautioned that a lot more research is needed. The BU findings are preliminary and have to be validated. But researchers are hopeful that if an elevated biomarker in a living person might indicate the presence of CTE, research into prevention and treatment of the disease can begin to move forward. “It’s a unique disease, and it’s going to have unique proteins that are modified in this disease, and this is the first indication that we’ve found one of the unique proteins,” said McKee, the director of BU’s CTE Center and senior author of the new study.Researchers have been studying the disease in earnest since Dr. Bennet Omalu first published a paper in the journal Neurosurgery 12 years ago called “Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy in a National Football League Player.” While leading experts agree the disease is linked to the repetitive hits suffered on the football field, it can be diagnosed only after a player has died. That has meant that many former players who suffered late in their lives from the effects of CTE never knew for certain they had the disease. McKee alone has made post-mortem CTE diagnoses on ex-players such as tight end Aaron Hernandez, who was serving a life sentence in prison when he killed himself in April. “This has really been our purpose: to give back to future generations,” she said. “It wasn’t just to categorize the disease and to find what these individuals had when they died. It’s really to understand CTE at the molecular and biochemical level, so we can figure out ways to detect it and more importantly, treat it.” Because neuropathologists can’t diagnose CTE in a living person, the study was limited to post-mortem brain tissue and samples of cerebrospinal fluid, “but it gives us clues that we might be able to detect it in living people,” McKee said. Of the 23 brains studied, 19 belonged to professional football players — including 18 who played in the NFL — and four others who reached the college level. The age range was 25 to 87 with a mean age of 62. The early findings do not necessarily allow researchers to determine how early they eventually might be able to detect the disease in a living person, McKee said. Of the samples studied, one came from a 49-year-old ex-player and another from a 53-year-old. Both of those subjects were diagnosed with Stage II (out of four stages) CTE. “Those are on the younger side and had relatively earlier CTE and we still found this elevation, so that’s really optimistic for the future,” she said. “Obviously, now we’ll go back and look at very early and young individuals and see if this is a marker of very early stage CTE.” While she is hopeful future studies support and expand on the initial findings, McKee said the new study should illustrate enough to silence any lingering skeptics who might doubt CTE’s existence. The unique biomarker should help distinguish the disease from Alzheimer’s disease, which often presents similar symptoms. “I’ve been frustrated for years that we keep discussing or debating whether or not this disease exists, whether or not it’s unique, whether it’s simply aging,” she said. “This is the first demonstration that shows it’s clearly not aging. It is a distinct disease, and we’re going to exploit the uniqueness of this disease to find treatment.” Saying the new findings are “certainly important,” an NFL spokesman noted that more research is needed and the league has allocated $40 million toward medical research. “Research around CTE must continue to move forward and fill in the gaps that remain around this important issue,” NFL spokesman Brian McCarthy said in a statement. “The NFL is committed to encouraging and supporting scientific research related to the diagnosis and treatment of concussion and associated conditions, including CTE.” McKee hopes future studies might be able to show the biomarker can be found in blood tests and perhaps show whether elevated CCL11 levels reveal anything about the severity of a subject’s disease. While the research will continue, McKee and her team are hopeful this latest discovery finally cracks open a door they have been staring at for a dozen years. “This was the first finding of a really unique component in this disease compared to others and compared to controls, so, yeah, it’s a eureka moment, but we don’t think it’s the end,” she said. “We think it’s the beginning.” www.washingtonpost.com/sports/breakthrough-may-lead-to-ability-to-diagnose-cte-in-living-football-players/2017/09/26/a6e1e8c4-a2bb-11e7-ade1-76d061d56efa_story.html?utm_term=.2fdc47f44006
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Post by mikecubs on Sept 29, 2017 21:31:31 GMT -6
Here is why this may not be such a great thing. Boston University’s CTE Breakthrough Could Forever Change Football The ability to detect brain disease while players are still alive and active will be a massive win for player safety—and a massive problem for the viability of the gameIn January 2016, Kansas City Chiefs lineman Laurent Duvernay-Tardif suffered a concussion in the first half of a playoff game against the Houston Texans. There were 271 concussions in the league that season, but Duvernay-Tardif, who was also attending medical school at McGill University during the offseason, understood the implications as well as any football player who’s ever suffered a head injury has. “Concussions is one of my fields of interests,” he told me last summer. “I’ve read a lot about it. Especially when you study pediatrics, which I do, because it’s one of the biggest injuries for kids under 16.” Duvernay-Tardif recognized the symptoms as soon as he began to display them: “I’m the one who went to the trainer and said, ‘Something is wrong.’ And the reason I was able to do that was I had knowledge.” While waiting to get cleared for game action the following week, Duvernay-Tardif dove further into his research, reading additional studies on the prognosis for concussions, including examining the testing and “scoring system” that he’d have to go through to prove health and return to the field. He’s now in his medical residency. He’s also still starting for the Chiefs, and I can’t think of a clearer example of how complex the NFL’s concussion issue is than that: Despite all of his knowledge, and despite his personal battle with a concussion, Duvernay-Tardif still plays. On Tuesday, the concussion conversation acquired a new and more urgent dynamic: Boston University researchers say that they have developed a way to test living patients for CTE, a neurodegenerative disease whose symptoms can include confusion, headaches, memory loss, depression, and impaired judgment, and that has been heavily linked to football. The CTE Breakthrough and the Burden of Understanding Concussions were already scary, even though the media tend to downplay the problem. A study from earlier this year found that journalists often soften the tone of the injury when relaying information to the public. We too often think of concussions as a problem for a coach trying to assemble a game plan absent a key player, and not as a life-changing event for that player. But Bears linebacker Leonard Floyd said he did not think straight for two months after his concussion; Aaron Rodgers once told Bill Simmons that one of his eyes went “metallic” after a concussion. “I think about how we’re almost numb to it because it's a part of the job,” then-Lions linebacker DeAndre Levy wrote on Instagram last year. “I became numb to the fact that CTE could be present in me.” If a test exists that reveals that presence to players, it will change the conversation around head injuries. And it will change football. In most of the conversations about head injuries and football that I’ve had with people knowledgeable about the subjects, there’s always been a far-away if inserted: If one day, CTE could be diagnosed in the living, the way we view football would change. In the decade or so since head injuries became a focal point of football conversation, CTE has seemed less urgent to the casual fan on Sundays because it previously could only be diagnosed in the deceased. While the BU researchers have cautioned that their findings are still in the early stages, the implications are already considerable. No sport commands as many viewers as the NFL, and no sport can retain as many sponsors and navigate as many crises. But the ability to test for CTE at any point during a player’s career—including long before he ever reaches the NFL—could send the sport spiraling.
If football fades in popularity, it won’t primarily be because of fans who are fed up with the ethical issues surrounding the game—be it health and safety, criminal behavior, or boycotts. Despite the amount of attention on those issues, they haven’t specifically caused any ratings declines. In fact, in the decade-plus since we first came to understand the sport’s lingering impact on a player’s body, football has become more popular. There will always be some level of cynicism about health and safety in football, both inside and outside of the game. ESPN’s Darren Rovell said that the NFL players he’s spoken to don’t care to know if they have CTE since it’s already a virtual certainty. This is a sport in which Jets rookie Jamal Adams said he’d like to die on a football field. But Tuesday’s news is not just about what current players say about the sport, because testing is still in its early stages of development. This is about future players one day knowing at an early age—perhaps before their NFL careers begin—that they have a brain disease. What if colleges decide to test for CTE for liability purposes before players’ careers begin? If large numbers of players are diagnosed with CTE during their college football days (where the numbers suggest there’s already a problem), what will the fallout be? Will colleges prevent them from playing again for liability or ethical reasons? Will young people get discouraged from ever starting the sport? Participation in the sport is already down in youth football since the start of this decade. The ability to decipher when CTE begins will be a massive win for player safety—and a massive problem for the viability of the game.If the NFL’s reach wanes, it will almost certainly be because the talent pipeline drains. Armed with the information that BU’s breakthrough could one day give to them, the players who stay in the game long enough to become stars in the NFL could end up bailing midcareer, especially after they’ve made a nice amount of money. NFL fans watch nationally televised games because of gambling and fantasy, yes, but history suggests they also watch for superstars. But let’s say you are a 30-year-old NFL superstar fresh off a four-year mega-contract. You take the test and you find out that you already have CTE and that it could get even worse if you continue to take repeated blows to the head. You know that studies have linked longer careers to more severe cases of CTE. What do you do?Only a few players have quit with health specifically in mind: Former Chiefs safety Husain Abdullah and 49ers linebacker Chris Borland are among them. Ravens lineman John Urschel retired in July, which a team source told ESPN was in part because of a study released days before that said that CTE was present in nearly 99 percent of the brains of deceased NFL players that were studied. Those are not the names that necessarily impact the ratings and watchability of a league already facing questions about those things. But if the league lost a wave of superstars to either midcareer retirement or never making it to the pros in the first place, the game would fundamentally change. That reality becomes much more realistic once science is able to tell a player in the middle of his football life how much damage his brain has already taken. There is no law that says football has to be the most popular sport in America. It is well-worn ground to point out that boxing used to be significantly more popular than it is today, but it’s a point worth thinking about nonetheless because it reminds us that once the talent pool in a given realm goes away, the popularity of the game soon follows. “The same world-class athletes that once gravitated to boxing—strong guys with superior hand-eye coordination, lower-class backgrounds, looking for a way out,” Simmons wrote in a 2002 love letter to boxing’s bygone era, “now gravitate toward basketball, baseball and football (where top stars earn more money and escape with their brains intact).” Boxing certainly has other problems—the lack of a unified governing body, off-the-wall scoring decisions—but if there were a critical mass of high-caliber heavyweights battling right now, viewers would be more engaged. We’re still years away from the NFL needing to contend directly with talent drain. But the only way to keep as many players coming into the league is to make the game as safe as possible, something that the NFL is at least attempting to do. I’ve spoken to many of its health and safety experts, and they are trying new technology and implementing medical advancements both to attempt to prevent concussions from happening (through things like new helmet technology) and to treat them once they occur (with improved testing and independent neurologists who can give an unbiased assessment of when players can return to the field). It is, as of yet, unclear what impact these efforts will have on the sport. And of course, the inherent problem remains: Hitting one’s head is always going to be dangerous. Flag football may be on the rise, college football may be reducing contact in practice, and the Canadian Football League may be getting rid of full-contact practices entirely, but nothing can change the reality that playing a game that requires repeatedly pounding one’s head against another human will eventually cause problems.What’s more: If CTE is diagnosed in the living, the ramifications for the NFL would also extend beyond the field of play to the courtroom. As former Packers executive and current MMQB columnist Andrew Brandt pointed out, CTE still isn’t a covered condition in the NFL’s concussion settlement, which was struck in 2013 and approved in 2015, and in which the NFL agreed to pay about $765 million to ex-players—an amount that has since jumped to around $1 billion. (Because CTE could never be proved in living people before, the settlement covers diseases stemming from CTE, such as dementia, but not CTE itself.) But if players file motions against the NFL, armed with the information that CTE could be diagnosed in the living, it would add a new layer to the concussion settlement. In fact, former NFL player Seth Joyner suggested just that, calling the news a “game changer.” Once it’s possible to confirm, nearly in real time, that CTE exists, there will be liability issues everywhere. Could a college be sued? Could a high school?At the beginning of his 1982 book, The Hardest Game, Hugh McIlvanney wrote an essay about the ethical ramifications of enjoying boxing. “Any supporter of boxing who does not admit to some residual ambivalence about its values, who has not wondered in its crueller moments if it is worth the candle, must be suspect,” he wrote. In order to survive, football must be thought of by fans and players alike as a game that people should play. The sport is losing that battle at the moment, and if Tuesday’s news leads to the clarity that it seems to promise, that outcome will only be more assured. Football has always been a violent game. Its legends of yesteryear often regret playing the sport, with Bo Jackson becoming the most recent superstar to voice that. A few years ago, Tom Brady’s father wondered aloud if he’d let his son play football if he were a kid in this era. Now that stands to become more of a mainstream opinion. It will take years to find out the true impact of Tuesday’s news, but it brings us closer to understanding what’s happening to these players before it’s too late. www.theringer.com/nfl/2017/9/26/16372088/boston-university-cte-test-for-the-living-football-impact
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Post by mikecubs on Sept 29, 2017 21:45:03 GMT -6
The big question is what do they mean by treatment? Will treatment mean clear up your brain damage 100% completely and you can go back again and again? Or does treatment mean only mitigating your brain damage but it's too dangerous to go back and you have to quit?
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Post by phillymike on Sept 29, 2017 22:25:19 GMT -6
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Post by mikecubs on Oct 1, 2017 19:58:24 GMT -6
snip In addition, a redistribution—and corresponding net reduction—of cerebrospinal fluid in the brain, which would be a downstream effect of elevated venous pressure from the collar, based on the physiology of collar placement, might also theoretically increase the risk for impact forces of the brain against the skull. This physiologic effect could lead to elevation of intracranial pressure with a corresponding reduction in cerebral perfusion pressure, both of which could be life threatening in the setting of a traumatic brain injury. Thus far, Myer confirms that there have been no blood clots to date, but the study numbers are small, so future studies will continue to address this possible concern. snip Giza went on to explain that “beyond this study, I'm not sure that the effect being seen is due to reduced brain slosh. While slosh is seemingly easily understood, the biomechanics are not so intuitive. For instance, if the fluid around the brain serves as a dampener for impact forces, then making the brain 'fit tighter' to the skull would seem to permit more direct energy transfer and acceleration/deceleration from the skull to the brain—this would have the opposite of the desired protective effect. This is not, as the authors say, like wrapping the brain in bubble wrap—venous engorgement would increase the brain's contact with the skull and theoretically displace the surrounding cerebrospinal fluid.” “By reducing the fluid in which the brain can slosh," argues Giza, “one could argue that a layer of bubble wrap is being removed.” “Think about the high school physics project, dropping a raw egg and preventing it from breaking. Putting the egg in a tight-fitting hard container would not typically be the best strategy, but encasing it in layer after layer of soft, pliable or sloshy material typically succeeds.” Giza also expressed concern about the rationale for the study itself, since it is known that low oxygen availability (hypoxia) at high altitudes typical triggers a compensatory increase in cerebral blood flow that subsequently leads to a reduction or redistribution of cerebrospinal fluid that surrounds the brain. And the argument goes that reducing intracranial cerebrospinal fluid reduces the dampening force of the fluid, placing the brain in closer contact with the skull, and greater risk for injury. “Some of the original premise for this line of investigation was based upon studies looking at rates of concussion at different altitudes,” explains Giza. “The studies typically used to support this suggest that increased cerebral blood flow at higher altitudes reduces brain slosh and thus is protective.” But the effect of altitude on injury is not consistent, unfortunately. “It is generally recognized that physiologically significant changes in cerebral blood flow and volume don't occur below 8,000-10,000 feet above sea level, an altitude rarely achieved for football or contact sports,” cautioned Giza. The "altitude” study on which Myer and colleagues based their studies is not adequate, according to Giza, because “600 meters (1,968 feet) is not sufficient to induce meaningful changes in cerebral blood flow.” www.forbes.com/sites/robertglatter/2017/05/16/can-the-q-collar-help-preserve-brain-function-in-football-players/3/#78dec4d372b3
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Post by mikecubs on Oct 13, 2017 21:40:06 GMT -6
DeAndre Levy testifies Lions encouraged him not to talk about CTEAppearing before a congressional subcommittee on brain injuries in football, former NFL linebacker DeAndre Levy testified the Lions tried to silence him from speaking publicly about CTE. “The moment I said anything about it, I had two calls telling me I shouldn’t talk about it,” Levy told the committee, via Kyle Meinke of mlive.com. “I don’t know if it was because it was CTE, or if it was because it’s just the general NFL rule of, like, only football. Only talk about football, only think about football. I posted simply the research . . . and I was told not to talk about it the first day it was out. And I’m just, like, you know, it could have just been locker room culture. Nobody wants to talk about anything other than football. But it didn’t sit well with me when I’m talking about brain injuries. “It’s my brain. It’s not my shoulder; it’s my brain. It controls everything I do; it controls everything we think, everything we feel. And if I don’t have the right to speak about that as a player, I think it really speaks about the culture of the NFL, of what those conversations are. I think that’s indicative of the conversations that we don’t hear. The closed-door conversations between owners. They still are trying to find ways to silence us.”Levy never mentioned the Ford family by name during his congressional subcommittee appearance but criticized ownership for failing to properly educate players about the long-term risks of brain injuries. “I don’t think the owners are in touch with it,” Levy said. “It’s a business. We’re a number. Our brains and bodies are disposable. I can’t speak for every team — I’ve only been with one team — but, I mean, I never sat down and talked with the owner. So there’s no connection [with] the players. Right now, we’re the only ones that will even care about the issue.” Levy played eight seasons in the NFL after the Lions made him a third-round pick, with his final five games coming last season. The Lions cut him in March, and he filed a grievance against the team seeking to recoup a $1.75 million injury guarantee, saying his knee isn’t healthy. UPDATE 8:29 P.M. ET: The Lions said in a statement, “We are aware of his comments, and we strongly disagree with his claim that anyone from our organization tried to silence him.” profootballtalk.nbcsports.com/2017/10/13/deandre-levy-testifies-lions-encouraged-him-not-to-talk-about-cte/
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Post by mikecubs on Oct 13, 2017 21:46:13 GMT -6
Hall of Famer Harry Carson implores Congress to make football saferParents should be informed before they sign up their kids to play football that the sport can cause long-term neurological damage, even to players who don't have obvious concussion symptoms, NFL Hall of Famer Harry Carson told a congressional panel on Friday. Carson, other former players and brain-injury researchers spoke at a forum organized by House Democrats who are exploring what, if anything, Congress can do to make the nation's most popular spectator sport safer. The former linebacker, who made nine Pro Bowls and won a Super Bowl in his 13-year career with the New York Giants, now devotes much of his time to raising awareness of head trauma and said he will not allow his 8-year-old grandson to play football. "Every parent should be informed. They should be informed as to what risks they are subjecting their kids to," said Carson, who was diagnosed with post-concussion syndrome in 1990. "Understand that your child could be subject to a neurological injury that could affect them for the rest of their lives." After the forum, Carson acknowledged his disappointment that head trauma in football, like so much in Washington these days, has become a partisan issue. Rep. Frank Pallone, a New Jersey Democrat who organized the forum along with Rep. John Conyers of Michigan, said Republicans had no interest in convening a formal hearing on the subject. And several members denounced President Donald Trump for his recent suggestion that the NFL is less enjoyable since the league began taking steps to address player safety. "It won't be a partisan issue if it affects some of their children," Carson said of Republicans. The NFL declined to send a representative to the forum, Pallone said. The league acknowledged a link between head blows and brain disease after years of denials and agreed in 2015 to a $1 billion settlement with former players. DeAndre Levy, who was released by the Detroit Lions in March and has filed a grievance against the franchise for the way his knee injury was handled, said there still isn't much knowledge in NFL locker rooms about the risk of chronic traumatic encephalopathy, the degenerative brain disease known as CTE. He said players are aware now that concussions need to be treated immediately, but they still don't understand the long-term effects of the repeated, "sub-concussive" head blows that are an inherent part of the sport."I don't think the organization wants to put that in the players' heads, that they can give themselves a degenerative brain disease. It's not talked about. It needs to be in the locker room," Levy said. "There's nothing in there about the long-term effects of it. It's not talked about at all."The panel also included researchers from Boston University who found that among 111 deceased NFL players whose families donated their brains for study, 110 of them showed signs of CTE. More research is needed to better understand at what age people can start and should stop playing football to mitigate the risks, they said. Several members asked what could be done to make football safer. The researchers and the ex-players agreed that there were no easy solutions, like better helmets.
"I'm not sure that equipment can make a difference," said Mike Adamle, a former player and sportscaster who was diagnosed last year with CTE-induced dementia.
For the risk of brain disease to drop substantially, the sport will have to evolve into something virtually unrecognizable, said Dr. Ann McKee, the lead researcher on the Boston University study.
"We need to start thinking about some very severe changes to the game so that the players wouldn't be having collisions and tackles on every play," McKee said. "Collision tackles and sub-concussive hits are an intrinsic part of the sport. That is what the NFL has not dealt with to date." www.espn.com/nfl/story/_/id/21012942/former-nfl-player-harry-carson-says-parents-required-know-risks-football
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Post by mikecubs on Oct 17, 2017 12:22:54 GMT -6
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Post by mikecubs on Oct 18, 2017 0:59:58 GMT -6
Mark Cuban sees NFL’s relevance continuing to spiral downward in futureCount Mark Cuban among those who see the NFL becoming less and less popular in the future. And it has nothing to do with the national anthem protests by players that have pushed a handful of fans away. Instead, the outspoken Dallas Mavericks owner pointed to the health and safety of the sport as the No. 1 reason for its decline. The national anthem protests, in Cuban’s mind, are more of a short-term issue.Cuban referenced a study from this summer that found 110 of 111 brains of deceased NFL players had chronic traumatic encephalopathy, commonly called CTE, a degenerative brain disease caused by repeated blows to the head. Dr. Ann McKee’s study was published in The Journal of the American Medical Association. “The NFL has got real structural problems,” Cuban said during an interview on 105.3 The Fan on Tuesday. “I have an 8-year-old son — I would not let my son play football. CTE’s a problem. … You can’t push something like CTE under the rug.”Cuban mentioned meeting with NCAA officials over the latest college basketball scandal, and the topic of football participation came up. Cuban said football participation is “down significantly” in all the SEC states. “They’re going to have to go global,” Cuban said of football grooming players. “Half of NFL rosters (in the future) are going to be international guys. That’s a bigger issue for the NFL longer term, and I don’t know how to fix that.” Cuban has criticized the NFL before, memorably saying: “Pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered.” He stands by that statement regarding football’s future. “They’re on path to be absolutely true,” Cuban said. “Because they haven’t been able to solve that (CTE) problem, they’re going to lose participants and they’re going to lose people watching. … I just don’t think kids are going to be as excited about football as we were growing up and that’s a long-term problem.”Cuban also criticized the NFL for having too many games, particularly Thursday Night Football where the games have largely been underwhelming in recent years. “People question the brand, question the quality of the brand,” Cuban said. Even though the NFL faces well-documented challenges, Cuban made it clear that the NBA isn’t immune to them either. Cuban acknowledged that it’s more difficult for every professional sports league to get kids excited and interested in their game and teams. That’s why he’s trying to lure more fans to American Airlines Center this season by offering more than 4,000 seats for $19 or less. “We’ve got to be more aggressive in creating young Mavericks fans, young NBA fans,” Cuban said. “I see the NFL pricing themselves out of families, which is going to make it very, very hard for them to develop young fans. We all have that challenge of how do we turn young kids, boys and girls, into hardcore NBA and Mavericks fans? That’s going to be a huge challenge for all of us going forward. “(We want it to be) where going to a Mavs game is competitive with going to a movie or going to a high school football game.” www.star-telegram.com/sports/nba/dallas-mavericks/article179359036.html
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Post by mikecubs on Oct 18, 2017 1:02:53 GMT -6
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Post by mikecubs on Nov 10, 2017 22:11:55 GMT -6
Brain of NFL star Aaron Hernandez ravaged by most severe CTEAaron Hernandez suffered the most severe case of chronic traumatic encephalopathy ever discovered in a person his age, damage that would have significantly affected his decision-making, judgment and cognition, researchers at Boston University revealed at a medical conference Thursday.Ann McKee, the head of BU’s CTE Center, which has studied the disease caused by repetitive brain trauma for more than a decade, called Hernandez’s brain “one of the most significant contributions to our work” because of the brain’s pristine condition and the rare opportunity to study the disease in a 27-year-old. Hernandez, a former New England Patriots tight end, hanged himself with a bedsheet in April in a Massachusetts prison while serving a life sentence for the murder of Odin Lloyd in 2013. In a diagnosis that linked one of football’s most notorious figures with the sport’s most significant health risk, doctors found Hernandez had Stage 3 CTE, which researchers had never seen in a brain younger than 46 years old, McKee said. The extent of that damage represents another signpost in football’s ongoing concussion crisis, which has seen professional players weigh early retirements and parents grapple with whether to allow their young sons to take up the sport. The findings released Thursday will only heighten those concerns. Because the center has received few brains from people Hernandez’s age, McKee could not say whether his brain was representative of a 27-year-old who had played as much football. But she found the advanced stage of CTE alarming. “In this age group, he’s clearly at the severe end of the spectrum,” McKee said. “There is a concern that we’re seeing accelerated disease in young athletes. Whether or not that’s because they’re playing more aggressively or if they’re starting at younger ages, we don’t know. But we are seeing ravages of this disease, in this specific example, of a young person.”At Thursday’s conference, McKee flipped through slides comparing sections of Hernandez’s brain to a sample without CTE. Hernandez’s brain had dark spots associated with tau protein and shrunken, withered areas, compared to immaculate white of the sample. His brain had significant damage to the frontal lobe, which impacts a person’s ability to make decisions and moderate behavior. As some new slides appeared on the projectors, some physicians and conference attendees gasped. “We can’t take the pathology and explain the behavior,” McKee said. “But we can say collectively, in our collective experience, that individuals with CTE, and CTE of this severity, have difficulty with impulse control, decision-making, inhibition of impulses for aggression, emotional volatility, rage behaviors. We know that collectively.”McKee said Hernandez had a genetic marker that makes people vulnerable to certain brain diseases and could have contributed to how aggressively he developed CTE. “We know that that’s a risk factor for neurogenerative disease,” McKee said. “Whether or not that contributed in this case is speculative. It may explain some of his susceptibility to this disease.” The condition of Hernandez’s brain, pristine because of his age and the adept handling of medical examiners, could lead to future breakthroughs and better understanding of CTE. For example, researchers could better study the interaction of inflammation and tau pathology through the use of fluorescent stains. It gave researchers their best view yet of a marker associated with CTE. “We are able to understand this disease at the scientific level in a way that’s very rarely presented,” McKee said. “We’re very grateful to the family for making this donation. We’re hoping this will advance medical science in a very significant way. . . . This will really accelerate and advance our research going forward.” BU researchers say they have discovered CTE in more than 100 former NFL players, a handful of whom have committed suicide. Medical examiners delivered Hernandez’s brain, weighing 1,573 grams, to BU’s labs in April. From the outside, it looked like a typical brain – no lesions, no bruises, no abnormalities. When researches sliced the brain into sections, they discovered startling damage. Ventricles were dilated, in response to the brain shrinking. Researchers determined Hernandez had lost brain tissue. Membranes that were supposed to be firm had grown “thin and gelatinous,” McKee said. There were abnormal, large holes in parts of Hernandez’s bran. The hippocampus, which plays a key role in memory, had shrunk.
The fornix, which also contributes to memory function, had atrophied.
The frontal lobe, which is responsible for problem-solving, judgment, impulse control and social behavior, had been pockmarked with tau protein.
The amygdala, which produces emotional regulation, emotional behavior, fear and anxiety, had been severely affected.
The temporal lobes, which process sights and sounds, showed significant damage.Together, they were “very unusual findings in an individual of this age,” McKee said. “We’ve never seen this in our 468 brains, except in individuals some 20 years older.” The physical damage inside Hernandez’s brain provides another layer to the catastrophic and tragic downfall of Hernandez, a gifted player who caught a touchdown pass from Tom Brady in the 2012 Super Bowl. Hernandez grew up a football star in Connecticut and fell in with a rough crowd at age 15, after his father died unexpectedly during a routine operation. He starred at Florida even as off-field trouble, in the form of drugs and violence, dogged him. The problems caused some teams to remove him from consideration in the NFL draft, and he lasted until the Patriots plucked him in the fourth round. Hernandez formed a dominating tandem with fellow 2010 draftee Rob Gronkowski and convinced the Patriots he had straightened out his life. The Patriots signed him to a seven-year, $40 million contract after the 2012 season. Months later, in the summer of 2013, Lloyd was murdered, his body found in a gravelly field a mile away from Hernandez’s mansion in North Attleboro. Hernandez’s estate filed a federal lawsuit against the Patriots in September, alleging the Patriots knew hits to the head could lead to brain damage and failed to protect him. A jury convicted Hernandez of the killing in 2015. Hernandez hanged himself in his cell just four days after a jury had acquitted him of the murders of Daniel de Abreu and Safiro Furtado, two strangers whom the state argued Hernandez killed in 2012 after an altercation at a Boston club. Thursday’s news conference coincided with the release of an NFL study consisting of video reviews of the 459 known concussions that occurred over the 2015 and 2016 seasons, from preseason games through the playoffs The NFL has attempted to make the sport safer for its players through rule changes, policies designed to remove concussed players and technological advances. But brain trauma occurs when a football player’s brain accelerates or decelerates after it hits another player or the turf, bashing the sides of the head, an action no helmet can prevent.
“It happens inside the skull,” McKee said. “It’s an intrinsic component of football.”www.philly.com/philly/news/nation_world/brain-of-nfl-star-aaron-hernandez-ravaged-by-most-severe-cte-20171110.html
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Post by mikecubs on Nov 10, 2017 22:15:47 GMT -6
Here is your brain on football
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Post by mikecubs on Nov 10, 2017 22:22:24 GMT -6
‘The cracks in the foundation are there’: Bob Costas imagines a future without footballSportscaster Bob Costas joined former Washington Post columnists Tony Kornheiser and Michael Wilbon and USA Today columnist Christine Brennan at the University of Maryland’s 12th Shirley Povich Symposium on Tuesday for a discussion about the biggest changes in sports since Costas was a guest at the first symposium in 2003. During the course of the evening, Costas and his fellow panelists all touched on something that would’ve been difficult to imagine 14 years ago: a future without football. “There are issues, including, although it’s a serious issue, the protests going on now in the NFL,” Costas said. “Those issues come and go. The issue that is most substantial — the existential issue — is the nature of football itself. … The nature of football is this: Unless and until there is some technology which we cannot even imagine, let alone has been developed, that would make this inherently dangerous game not marginally safer, but acceptably safe, the cracks in the foundation are there. The day-to-day issues, serious as they may be, they may come and go. But you cannot change the basic nature of the game. I certainly would not let, if I had an athletically gifted 12- or 13-year-old son, I would not let him play football.”Costas, who recalled his father taking him to the 1962 NFL championship game at Yankee Stadium, rejected those who are quick to dismiss football’s concussion crisis as part of a “left-wing conspiracy to undermine something that is quintessentially American.” “The truth is the truth,” Costas said, referencing the memoir “Truth Doesn’t Have a Side” by Bennet Omalu, the researcher credited with discovering chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) in the brain of Steelers Hall of Fame center Mike Webster in 2002. “Some of the best people I’ve met in sports have been football people, but the reality is that this game destroys people’s brains. … That’s the fundamental fact of football, and that to me is the biggest story in American sports.” Kornheiser suggested that football will eventually go the way of horse racing and boxing, two other sports that were once wildly popular.
“It’s not going to happen this year, and it’s not going to happen in five years or 10 years, but Bob is right: At some point, the cultural wheel turns just a little bit, almost imperceptibly, and parents say, ‘I don’t want my kid to play.’ And then it becomes only the province of the poor, who want it for economic reasons to get up and out, and if they don’t find a way to make it safe — and we don’t see how they will — as great as it is, as much fun as it is … the game’s not going to be around. It’s not.”Wilbon, Kornheiser’s longtime co-host on ESPN’s “Pardon the Interruption,” said people need look no further than the independent studies that have come out about what playing football does to the brain. Costas agreed. “ They keep saying, ‘We need more information. More and more information will become available,’ ” Costas said. “Yes, it will, and it won’t be good for football. The more information comes out, the worse it looks. What we know is that brain trauma, the younger the person is, the worse it is because the brain isn’t fully developed until your mid-20s, especially the pre-frontal cortex. And the longer you play tackle football, the more cumulative hits, in addition to the disproportionate impact on a young person, leads you to the common-sense conclusion that if you’re going to play tackle football, you shouldn’t play tackle football at all until you’re 18 years old, at a minimum. But then, where is the talent pool for college? What happens to college football? The whole thing could collapse like a house of cards if people actually begin connecting the dots.”www.washingtonpost.com/news/dc-sports-bog/wp/2017/11/08/the-cracks-in-the-foundation-are-there-bob-costas-imagines-a-future-without-football/?utm_term=.7643c5e19e0c
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Post by mikecubs on Nov 16, 2017 9:47:05 GMT -6
Ex-NFL player confirmed as 1st case of CTE in living patientResearchers published, what they say is the first case of a living person identified with the degenerative brain disease, chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE. While unnamed in the study, lead author Dr. Bennet Omalu confirmed to CNN that the subject of the case was former NFL player, Fred McNeill -- who died in 2015. Omalu is credited with first discovering CTE in professional football players. The only way to definitively diagnose the disease is with a brain exam after death. The discovery was first made in 2012 using an experimental brain scan that can trace a signature protein of CTE called tau. The case study was published in the journal Neurosurgery this week. 'It looked like just depression' Omalu first presented these findings exclusively to CNN's chief medical correspondent, Dr. Sanjay Gupta in 2016. McNeill's wife, Tia, and his two sons, Gavin and Fred Jr., told Gupta then, that they saw Fred transform from a fun loving family man at the center of their lives into a man who was dealing with symptoms of memory loss, anger and depression that tore their family apart. "There are some times where the father is the stronghold in the family, or the anchor. If you lose that, everything kind of falls apart. That's kind of what happened for us. It looked like financial issues at first; it looked like marital issues, and they separated; then it looked like just depression," Gavin told Gupta. CTE is known for plaguing people with Alzheimer's like symptoms such as memory loss, rage, mood swings, and in some cases, suicidal ideation. Severity of the disease is categorized into four stages, with stage 4 being the most severe. While researchers don't know exactly why certain people develop the disease and others don't, they believe that it results from repeated blows to the head that trigger a build up of tau proteins in the brain. Could veterans have concussion-related CTE? CTE has been called football's "concussion crisis," however experts point out that CTE can develop from any repeated head injury. According to the Boston University CTE Center, "this trauma includes both concussions that cause symptoms and subconcussive hits to the head that cause no symptoms." These subconcussive hits can include the repeated trauma the brain experiences from constant plays, hitting the turf, and tackling. Wrestlers, boxers, and military troops have also been diagnosed with the disease. Seeing CTE While the experimental technology has been used on at least a dozen other former NFL players including Pro Football Hall of Famer, Dallas Cowboy Tony Dorsett, McNeill is the first case to have the test results confirmed with an autopsy. Omalu helped develop and is invested in the diagnostic exam, which uses a radioactive "tracer" called FDDNP to bind to tau proteins in the brain. The tau proteins can then be seen on a PET scan of the brain. Critics have said the protein also can highlight another protein called amyloid, which may be indicative of Alzheimer's or other forms of dementia. But Omalu noted that in CTE, tau makes distinctive patterns in the brain. It has a "specific topographic signature," he said, and that pattern can be detected in imaging.Omalu said he and his team are currently raising money to start a phase 3 clinical trial to further test the technology and replicate what they have seen in McNeill. He anticipates that once funds are raised, it will take another two to three years for the trial and then another year, at least, for approval from the US Food and Drug Administration. When asked, how soon a commercial test could be available, Omalu predicted it could be as soon as a few years. "We are looking at less than five years," he said.www.cnn.com/2017/11/16/health/cte-confirmed-in-first-living-person-bn/index.html
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Post by mikecubs on Nov 19, 2017 22:50:46 GMT -6
Jets’ Jeremy Kerley to have 8-year-old son stop playing youth football due to CTE concerns Dae’shon Kerley is an eight-year-old dynamo on the football field, who makes the rest of the kids look like fools. He’s fast and elusive just like his old man, but a trouble that lies beneath the surface won’t be ignored by his family anymore. The potential risks for children playing tackle football have prompted Dae’shon’s father to intervene. Jets wide receiver Jeremy Kerley is ending his son’s football career. “He has the most moves and the most skills,” Kerley told the Daily News. “So naturally they want to put the ball in his hands every play. So, he’s getting tackled a lot. But when you come home and your son says, ‘Dad, I got a headache a little bit.’ You’re like, ‘WTF. You’re too young to have headaches playing football. You’re done. Don’t worry about that.’”The father knows the terrors of playing such a savage sport. He’s only 5-9, 188 pounds himself, trying to survive in this vicious world. Kerley is currently serving a four-game suspension for violating the NFL’s policy on performance enhancing substances, perhaps a tacit admission that he needs help to continue to play this dangerous collision sport. It’s a path that Kerley clearly doesn’t want his son to follow. Dae’shon was making others look silly from the minute he started playing flag football at age 5. He became an unstoppable running back and safety at the youth level before he told his parents about the headaches. It scared Jeremy Kerley, who has suffered two documented concussions in the past four years of his seven-year NFL career. The growing concern over chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) in football players has put parents like Kerley and his wife, Kristal Juarez, who was a track star at TCU, on high alert when it comes to their kids. Scientists have linked the brain disease to repetitive head trauma suffered by players in this collision sport. High-profile former players Junior Seau, Dave Duerson, Ken Stabler and Frank Gifford were among those diagnosed with CTE after their deaths. “At the end of the day, a father makes a decision based on the health and well-being of his children,” Kerley said. “That’s what he’s supposed to do. Just because I play football doesn’t mean that you should too. I’m looking out for his best interest. I’ve lived and learned this game is brutal. This game can hurt you. CTE can hurt you. If I can prevent him from that, that’s what I’m going to do.”Boston University researchers released findings this fall from a study that concluded that former players who started playing tackle football before the age of 12 were at a greater risk of cognitive problems, including depression, later in life. Many pathologists believe that young developing brains shouldn’t be exposed to the rigors of tackle football. NFL players like Chiefs quarterback Alex Smith won’t allow his sons to participate in tackle football until they’re in at least eighth grade. “I let him play at first, but as information grows and they find out more and more about CTE…” Kerley said. “Even before we found out about CTE, this is just a brutal game. This will be his last year. I have the control to say, ‘No, you’re not going to do that right now. When he gets older, he’ll make his own decisions. But right now, I can prevent him from playing, so I definitely will.” Kerley and his wife will encourage Dae’shon to continue to play other sports that he’s also excelled at like baseball, basketball, soccer and track, but football will be off limits.
“It’s one of those things where I hope he doesn’t take it to heart,” Kerley said of preventing his son from playing football. “But I got the final decision. My wife and I do a great job of handling our kids. She knows how brutal this game is too. She knows exactly what I’ve gone through. So, she feels like we’re not going to put our son in this situation.”The next frontier in the CTE debate centers on diagnosing it in living patients. Boston University scientists have found a biomarker that might help to that end in the next decade. Renowned neuroscientist Dr. Bennet Omalu recently published findings in the journal Neurosurgery that discovered the tau protein responsible for killing brain cells (and indicator of CTE) in former Vikings linebacker Fred McNeill before he died. McNeill was the first person diagnosed with CTE while alive. Such a breakthrough could ultimately help medical professionals develop treatments for the insidious disease, prompting questions about whether a player would actually take such a test. The NFL has undergone intense scrutiny for a seemingly lax concussion protocol centering on blows to the head on quarterbacks Russell Wilson and Jacoby Brissett in recent weeks. Would the league encourage players to take a test to determine whether or not they have CTE? “Obviously it would be good to know, especially if it’s something that you can get help for,” the 29-year-old Kerley said. “I wouldn’t compare that to anything that’s terminal like cancer… but it’s still knowing something big. That’s scary.” Kerley’s last documented concussion occurred in a 2015 preseason game with the Jets. He admitted that “it would be a little easier to take the (CTE) test” if he were at the very end of his career or retired, but cautioned that test results showing even a mild case of CTE in his late 20s could prompt teams to steer clear. “ If you tell someone that you even have a slight case of it, that would change the whole track of your career,” Kerley said. “ I’m in Year 7. If I know I got it, I’m not going to play Year 8.”It’s a scenario that Jeremy Kerley hopes his son never experiences. www.nydailynews.com/sports/football/jets/jets-kerley-son-stop-playing-football-cte-concerns-article-1.3642059
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