New study: Concussions ‘irrelevant’ for triggering CTE

[mikecubs]

This deserves it's own thread since people always refer to CTE as "the concussion issue". Both the NFL/NHL want people to believe that it's just concussions that are the problem. With it being ALL the cumulative blows it means contact sports are doomed because there is the contact.

New study: Concussions ‘irrelevant’ for triggering CTE

A new study has found further evidence linking hits to the head rather than concussions to the onset of chronic traumatic encephalopathy, the neurodegenerative disease traced back to the kind of head trauma experienced by football players, other athletes and combat veterans.

“The concussion is really irrelevant for triggering CTE,” Dr. Lee Goldstein, an associate professor at Boston University School of Medicine and College of Engineering, and a corresponding author of the study, told The Post. “It’s really the hit that counts.

“Although that’s the headline, this is the best scientific evidence to date, in fact some of the only scientific evidence, that we have that that’s so. . . . This is the first really solid evidence that we have where we have controlled experiments where we can make that case very strongly and convincingly.”

The study, led by Boston University researchers and published Thursday in Brain, a peer-reviewed journal of neurology, analyzed the brains of teenagers with head injuries and used mice to recreate head trauma, revealing more about the origins of CTE and its relationship to traumatic brain injuries (TBI), concussions and subconcussive head injuries.

“The same brain pathology that we observed in teenagers after head injury was also present in head-injured mice. We were surprised that the brain pathology was unrelated to signs of concussion, including altered arousal and impaired balance, among others. Our findings provide strong causal evidence linking head impact to TBI and early CTE, independent of concussion,” Goldstein said. “The results may explain why approximately 20 percent of athletes with CTE never suffered a diagnosed concussion.”

The study’s findings extend beyond athletics and the military.

“There are many vulnerable populations at greatly increased risk of repetitive head injury including domestic abuse, incarcerated populations, homeless,” Goldstein said. “It’s a big problem for the NFL, a bigger problem for amateur athletics and an even larger problem still for the greater public.”

When it comes to head injuries and CTE, Goldstein spoke of three categories that are being jumbled: concussions, TBI and CTE. Concussion, he says, is a syndrome defined “by consensus really every couple of years, based on the signs and symptoms of neurological syndrome, what happens after you get hit in the head. It’s nothing more than that, a syndrome. You take one [symptom] from column A, one from column B.”

A TBI is different. “it is an injury, an event,” he said. “It’s not a syndrome. It’s an event and it involves damage to tissue. If you don’t have a concussion, you can absolutely have brain injury and the converse is true.”

CTE is “a bona fide neurodegenerative disease. It will progress independently of whether you have future hits and a lot of people think that the injury is the disease and it’s not. There is an injury and then it goes on to spread in the brain, like other neurodegenerative diseases.”

Which means that the focus on concussion doesn’t prevent the development of CTE.

“My analogy for this is it’s like having health officials focus on the hacking cough in smokers rather than the lung cancer,” Goldstein said. “A cough can be related to smoking – there can be many other causes of a cough. But the fact that you have or do not have a cough is irrelevant to whether you have cigarette-caused lung cancer. . . . It’s the same with chest pain and a heart attack. We would no more rely on chest pain to be the single indicator of whether you’ve had a heart attack.

“So concussion may or may not be a TBI and equally important not having a concussion may or may not be associated with a TBI. A concussion doesn’t tell you anything about a TBI. Nor does it tell you anything about CTE.”

The cumulative effect of smaller hits is something that Goldstein and Dr. Ann McKee and others labeled “the bobblehead effect” in a 2012 paper on blast neurotrauma in the military. That effect is, Goldstein says, “the injury on top of the injury, on top of the injury” and it means that the focus on concussion protocol, while important, may not prevent CTE. Concussion, according to Goldstein, is “a minor subset of all hits.” The vast majority are subconcussive, which the Concussion Legacy Foundation says are below the concussion threshold: “the brain is shaken, but not so violently that the damage to brain cells is severe.” Those are the ones to worry about, especially in young people.

The researchers in the new study looked at the brains of four teenage athletes who had sustained closed-head impact injuries anywhere from one to 128 days before death and found the results particularly alarming. Two were 18 and two 17; two died by suicide. One died suddenly 10 days after the second of two sports-related head injuries, the fourth succumbed after sustaining three sports-related concussions (26 days, 6 days and the day before death.) The last concussion came during a football game in which the player absorbed a hard tackle and landed on his helmet. Analysis of their brains showed a range of post-traumatic pathology that included one case of early-stage CTE and two cases with abnormal accumulation of tau protein, a CTE marker typically found in small blood vessels in the brain.


“You get hit the first time and a minute later you get hit again. We learned that from blasts because those happen in milliseconds. In football, it happens in minutes, tens of minutes or over a day or week. But the cumulative effect, when the brain is not fully healed, particularly in younger people, is really, really damaging,” Goldstein said, “and that’s the problem. You won’t see it by focusing on concussion. In fact it’s guaranteed that you won’t see it.

“There are many players who are hit, who are hurt and who aren’t getting help because it’s clear that they’re not at the level of concussion. Their brains are not in good shape and they go on to the next hit and the next one.”

The NFL responded that it has been proactive in emphasizing safety first, limiting contact during offseason, training camp and regular-season practices.

“This latest study, as well as other research around TBI and CTE, continues to advance the discussion, awareness and understanding around this important issue,” Dr. Alan Sills, a neurosurgeon who is the league’s chief medical officer, said in a statement. “As highlighted in this recent study, repetitive hits to the head have been consistently implicated as a cause of CTE by this research group. How and why exactly this manifests, who is at risk, and why – these are questions that we as researchers and clinicians are working to answer.

“As the research community continues to explore these critical questions, the NFL has made real strides to try to better protect our players and reduce contact to the head including implementing data-driven rules changes intended to eliminate potentially dangerous tactics and reduce the risk of injuries, especially to the head and neck; enforcing limits on contact practice; and mandating ongoing health and safety education for players and training for club and non-affiliated medical personnel.

“Ultimately, being active, getting outside, playing sports, particularly team sports, is important. There are also concerns about the risks involved in playing sports, including football, which is why it has been encouraging to see similar developments at the youth level such as the certification of over 130,000 youth and high school coaches through USA Football’s Heads Up program; USA Football’s National Practice Guidelines – including limits on full contact; Pop Warner’s initiatives, from no intentional head-to-head contact to requiring players who suffer a suspected head injury to receive medical clearance from a concussion specialist before returning to play; and 50 states have a Return to Play law, which can help reduce the rates of recurrent concussions. We hope that all youth sports will continue to take measures to reduce head contact through similar rules changes, education and improved protective equipment.”

The study was conducted by a BU-led research team that included scientists from Cleveland Clinic, Harvard Medical School, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, New York Medical College, University of California, Berkeley, University of Massachusetts Lowell, The Jackson Laboratory, VA Boston Healthcare System, Ben-Gurion University (Israel), Dalhousie University (Canada), and University of Oxford (UK). It was funded by the U.S. National Institutes of Health, U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, U.S. Department of Defense, U.S. Department of Energy, Boston University Alzheimer’s disease and CTE Center, University of California, Berkeley, WWE, National Football League, National Operating Committee on Standards for Athletic Equipment, European Union, Israel Science Foundation, Canadian Institute of Health Research, Andlinger Foundation and Concussion Legacy Foundation.

bangordailynews.com/2018/01/19/health/new-study-concussions-irrelevant-for-triggering-cte/

[mikecubs]

Leagues trying to eliminate concussions from the game have been missing the point entirely

In a week in which Stefon Diggs, Case Keenum and the rest of the Minnesota Vikings authored one of pro sport’s most memorable game-changers, it was actually researchers at Boston University who authored the biggest game-changer of all with the release of a study on Thursday that found concussions have nothing to do with causing the brain-wasting disease, chronic traumatic encephalopathy.

Great news, right? Good God, no.

Because in a study that literally changes everything, research led by Boston University found that it’s hits to the head generally — not just the ones that cause concussions — that cause CTE, which has been shown to lead to everything from depression to early-onset dementia to Parkinson’s Disease.

"The concussion is really irrelevant for triggering CTE... it’s really the hit that counts," Dr. Lee Goldstein, an associate professor at Boston University School of Medicine, told the Washington Post on Thursday following the release of the study in the peer-reviewed neurology journal, Brain.

"It’s a big problem for the NFL, a bigger problem for amateur athletics and an even larger problem still for the greater public."

Yeah, I’ll say it’s a problem.

Because until now, it turns out we’ve all been operating under a delusion that if we can just reduce the number of concussions in sport — and mitigate the effects of the ones that do happen with strict protocols — everything would be fine.

From Timbits hockey to the NHL, Pop Warner to the NFL, all the emphasis over the past decade has been placed on taking concussions out of the game.

But it turns out we’ve been focusing on the symptom instead of the cause. "My analogy for this is it’s like having health officials focus on the hacking cough in smokers rather than the lung cancer," Goldstein told the Post.

Goldstein says the real issue isn’t concussions, it’s what called TBI — traumatic brain injuries. And that’s a problem because you can get a TBI without getting a concussion by either taking a "subconcussive" blow to the head — by far the more common — or a series of hits, the so-called ‘bobblehead effect,’ which can be most dangerous for young athletes with developing brains.

So what’s all that mean? It means everything.

It means we’re crazy if we think an athlete who’s taken a blow to the head in the first half is safe to return in the second half simply because he’s "passed" a concussion test in the dressing room.

It means that just because an athlete is no longer demonstrating post-concussion symptoms doesn’t mean it’s safe for him or her to return to play.

It means you’re kidding yourself if you think your kid is safe just because he or she is playing in a no-contact hockey league.

And it means, more than anything, that we’ve been missing the point entirely with all this emphasis on concussions and protocols.

Because if what the Boston University research has found is true — and those guys have been the pioneers in CTE research since Day One — then you’ve got to seriously ask yourself, both as a parent of kids in contact sports or simply as a casual fan, whether there is truly any safe level of contact in sports?

If it’s no longer just the big hits to the head that we have to worry about but also the cumulative effects of something as simple as the kind of routine tackle or bodycheck that happens dozens of times every game, then at some point we’re all going to have to ask ourselves if any of this is worth the risk any longer?

Now, make no mistake, we all willingly engage everyday in behaviours that increase our risks of injury or disease.

If you get into a motor vehicle today instead of simply walking you’ve made the calculation that you’re willing to increase your risk of being injured or killed in a collision in exchange for saving time and energy.

If you pick up the salt shaker at lunch, you’ve accepted an elevated risk of heart disease in exchange for adding some flavour.

And if you lace on the skates tonight to play with the boys in some beer league, the Boston University research says even a bunch of fat, middle-aged guys skating very, very slowly are accepting an increased risk of developing CTE in exchange for a few laughs.

My point is nothing we do is entirely safe and we’re making risk assessments in our own lives — and on behalf of our children — a dozen times a day, usually without even realizing it.

And that’s totally fine — it’s called living.

But then let’s also stop kidding ourselves that all this emphasis in recent years on taking concussions out of sport is somehow rendering contact sports safe.

That proposition was bogus before this week and it’s especially bogus now, with the revelation that concussions were never the problem in the first place.

What became clear this week — if it wasn’t already clear — is that contact sports can be bad, sometimes life-alteringly bad, for the people who play them.

And while there are certainly more steps we can take to make those sports safer, we will never make them safe. Not entirely, anyway.

We will either learn to live with that sobering fact, or contact sports as we know it will slowly wither and die.

Either way, no one can pretend after this week that we didn’t know all the risks.

www.winnipegfreepress.com/sports/leagues-trying-to-eliminate-concussions-from-the-game-have-been-missing-the-point-entirely-470168763.html

[mikecubs]

“It is the hits, not the concussions, that cause CTE. And by hits, I mean all of them,” said Dr. Lee E. Goldstein, an associate professor at Boston University School of Medicine and author on the new paper. “In every practice and in every play. The hits no one is paying attention to.”

www.bostonherald.com/news/columnists/lindsay_kalter/2018/01/kalter_bu_study_finds_link_between_mild_head_hits_and_cte

“On the football field, we’re paying attention to the bright, shiny object — concussion — because it’s obvious,” said Dr. Lee E. Goldstein of Boston University, who led the study published Thursday in the journal Brain. But, he continued, “it’s hits to the head that cause CTE.”

www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-cte-head-hits-20180118-story.html

[mikecubs]

More info (snips)

-It means attempts to monitor and prevent concussions, and even new designs for helmets, may be futile, since nothing can change the motion of head movement inflicted by a flying tackle

-'The concussion is the red herring here,' lead author Dr Lee Goldstein, associate professor at Boston University, told Daily Mail Online.

'This is the strongest evidence to date of a causal linkage between hits in football and CTE. We can probably prevent concussion. But what we can't do is prevent the motion of the head from a tackle. And that's the real problem.'



This diagram from the Boston study shows the tell-tale head movement that can cause CTE in the brains of athletes from a tackle or soldiers exposed to a bomb blast. Dr Goldstein warns it would be near-impossible to prevent this head movement with a helmet or armour


-It is not the concussion, it is the way the head is hit' Dr Goldstein explains.

'At the end of the day, there is no difference in the way brain looks after a hit, no matter how the hit was sustained. Any hit can have this effect. We were not expecting that.

'This is concerning for everyone, including kids.'


-But until now, many believed the harder the hits, the worse the risk of disease.


-Players who suffer major hits on the field are carted off for a concussion assessment and usually sidelined from play if a concussion is found.

But according to Dr Goldstein, it is the head movement, not the result. Anyone who suffers a blow to the left side of their head, as happens in a bomb blast, has a high risk of developing the dangerous plaques that then grow into neurological disease.


-He cites the case of Tom Savage, the Houston Texans quarterback, who suffered a seizure on the field in December after a flying tackle from Elvis Dumervil of the San Francisco 49ers. After a brief stint on the sideline, Savage was put back out to play.

'He was not concussed. He had a post-traumatic seizure, which was worse. He had a bonafide seizure which was way way worse. And they put him back in. '



-The only way to prevent CTE, he says, is not to play football or boxing or any sport that inflicts such head injuries.

'The biggest risk factor is repeated exposure,' Dr Goldstein said.

'You want to know how to prevent it? Don't play. No helmet can prevent this.'



-But Dr Goldstein insists that, unless these measures prevent all blows to the head, players are still at risk; even one hit on a teenager can offset the disease, which grows and worsens over a lifetime, with devastating side effects.


-Now, even attending football games at his daughters' school makes him feel uneasy.

'In any other setting I would be mandated by law to report this as child abuse. These children are getting hit on the head repeatedly, and I know it is putting them at risk of neurological disease,' he told Daily Mail Online.

'But instead here I am with all the other parents cheering because our team did a good tackle.

'Kids can't drink alcohol until a certain age, they can't drive until a certain age, and they can't walk around the street hitting each other in the heads with pipes. Those activities can all be lethal. And so can this. There must be a policy change, we have a moral obligation to protect children - and adults - from harm.'


www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-5284393/Concussion-red-herring-CTE.html

[mikecubs]

Is football almost over? Why latest studies on CTE is bad news for the game

The latest evidence of football's mortality came late last week in the form of yet another Boston University autopsy. The study suggests concussions aren't the only contributing factor to the progressive degenerative brain disease known as CTE. All those blows inbetween could produce the same results without a concussion, and that would be the worst news yet.

And if it's all true, then football is over.

Before going there, though, consider this caveat first: While other scientists concede the important of the study -- funded by, among others, the U.S. Department of Defense and the NFL - they also say it's too soon to draw dire conclusions from something based on four teens and a "mouse model."

Just the same, until more definitive research is forthcoming, it's probably a good idea to do something other than wait on a better helmet.

Chris Nowinski, CEO of the Concussion Legacy Foundation, has an idea, and he's peddling it with the help of two Pro Football Hall of Fame linebackers.

Citing evidence that the best way to prevent CTE is to avoid playing tackle football until high school, Nowinski, Harry Carson and Nick Buoniconti propose "Flag Football Under 14." The rationale is that, like the damage done young pitchers by over-use, any sort of head trauma in pre-teens can have both short- and long-term implications.

Now, in case you were wondering how this might affect little Johnny's NFL aspirations, Carson noted at Sunday's news conference in Boston that he didn't play football until high school. His grandson won't, either.

As a matter of fact, Carson -- who's had headaches, blurred vision and depression since retiring from the Giants in 1988 -- has said he wouldn't have played football at all if he'd known then what he knows now at 64.

And what he knows now is that tackle football "is not an appropriate sport for young children."

If that hits you where you live, believe me, I get it.

Straight up: Both of my boys played football from fourth grade up to and, in one case, through high school and into college. From the looks of their experience in those early years, it didn't seem to hurt much, unless you count my sensibilities. Mostly it was like watching zombies play. I've seen more violence in communion lines.

But I'm sure that's not the case for all youth football players. That's not how it was for Buoniconti, now 77 and suffering from dementia.

"I made a mistake starting tackle football at 9 years old," the Dolphin legend said in a news release. "Now CTE has taken my life away.

"Youth tackle football is all risk with no reward."

We could debate at what point football caused Buoniconti's problems. But it's pretty clear by now that, whenever it happened, football was the culprit.

Most football players won't develop CTE, just as cancer isn't an outcome for every smoker. The problem is, how do we tell who's next? Multiple concussions aren't even a certain predictor. Roger Staubach figures he had 20, not that you could tell.

And if that's not confusing enough, now there's a study suggesting that even if you never sustain a concussion playing football, you could develop CTE from the day-to-day stuff.

If more research proves the latest study accurate, I don't know how football continues in its current state. And not just on the junior high level, either.

Concussions give us markers, and, to a reasonable extent, medical science can treat them. But if the effect of routine hits can't be measured, yet the toll is the same, how do we determine who needs help? I mean, before it's too late?

The question posed to parents these days is whether they'd allow their sons to play, given the information available. Some prominent NFL exes and a former POTUS have voted no. But it may no longer be their call alone.

Consider the liability any school or university would face if BU's latest study is substantiated. How many would continue to sponsor football? How could they protect themselves in the court cases to come when asked what they knew and when they knew it?

Frankly, the prospects are more than a little unsettling. Until we know more, we must ratchet up efforts to make the game safer and better protect our youth. One of these days it may entail more difficult choices. We can save that discussion for then, but I have to tell you, it's going to be hard for at least one of us.

sportsday.dallasnews.com/dallas-cowboys/cowboys/2018/01/23/football-almost-latest-studies-cte-bad-news-game

[mikecubs]

Watch the 2min 17 sec mark on. It does a GREAT job explaining the risk of the small hits adding up

abcnews.go.com/GMA/video/study-sheds-light-threat-head-injuries-youth-athletes-52460528

[mikecubs]

Bob Costas ‘actually happy’ he won’t be part of NBC’s Super Bowl coverage

When news broke Monday that Bob Costas would not be part of NBC’s Super Bowl coverage next month, some speculated the decision was connected to the longtime broadcaster’s criticism of football’s negative health effects.

But in reality, Costas says his removal from the broadcast was “mutually agreeable.”

“Not only do I not have a problem with it, I am actually happy about it,” Costas told SportsBusiness Daily. “I have long had ambivalent feelings about football, so at this point, it’s better to leave the hosting to those who are more enthusiastic about it.”

In November, Costas — who hosted NBC’s Football Night in America Sunday pregame show for more than 10 years — made some blunt comments about football’s bleak future while speaking at a symposium hosted by the University of Maryland’s Philip Merrill College of Journalism.

“The reality is that this game destroys people’s brains," he said then.

Costas refuted the notion that those words had any impact on the decision to leave him off the Super Bowl broadcast.

“I have been making the same points for several years, often on NBC,” Costas said. “In halftime commentaries, interviews with Roger Goodell and other prominent NFL figures, appearances on CNN and elsewhere, I have addressed the issue of football and its undeniable connection to brain trauma many times. Why? Because the evidence is overwhelming and the effects are often devastating.

“It’s the elephant in the stadium at every game whether others choose to acknowledge it or not. And it’s not going away. So the idea that I am only now finding my voice on this, or that NBC was taken aback by what I said at Maryland is just wrong. It’s all simple and straightforward.”

Dan Patrick and Liam McHugh will host NBC’s Super Bowl pregame show.

www.nydailynews.com/sports/football/bob-costas-happy-won-part-nbc-super-bowl-coverage-article-1.3776225

[mikecubs]

Do NOT let your child get swept up by the Super Bowl: Top CTE researchers warn there is no way to make the game safe for players' brains
A new poll shows the rate of kids in football has dropped, and the rate of parents concerned about brain injuries has increased
Researchers told Daily Mail Online there is no way to prevent brain injuries in the sport
Dr Robert Stern, Director of Clinical Research at BU’s CTE center, warns any kind of hit - not just a concussion - may be dangerous
Using helmets, he warns, merely encourages harder hits - without them head hits would be too painful or dangerous
Famously, New England Patriots tight end Aaron Hernandez, who killed himself last year while in jail for murder, started playing football before the age of nine
After Hernandez's death at 27, he was diagnosed with the worst case of CTE despite only having two concussions on record

American football may never be the same again after this Super Bowl.

That isn't because the New England Patriots' star quarterback Tom Brady may retire soon (though that will be a significant moment in NFL history), nor the saga of kneeling during the national anthem, which permeated all major sports.

It is because this has been the most groundbreaking year to date in terms of research proving links between football tackles and neurodegenerative brain diseases, including dementia, ALS, and chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE).

As those studies have emerged, the rate of children playing American football has declined - a trend which threatens to shrink the next generation of fans and players if it continues.

Unsurprisingly, the top researchers investigating football-linked brain injuries cannot help but support that shift.

Dr Robert 'Bob' Stern, a once die-hard Patriots fan who is now Director of Clinical Research for Boston's University's CTE Center, warns children should not play tackle football given what we now know about its links with brain disease.

Speaking to Daily Mail Online, he warned youth football - even with measures to limit concussions - involves hundreds of sub-concussive hits every season, and he fears that the very nature of the sport is incompatible with cognitive health, no matter what we do to change it.

But one group of former players, who have all been diagnosed with football-linked brain diseases, are pushing another tact: banning tackles in favor of 'flag football' for under-14s in a desperate bid to save the sport.

The rate of kids played football has dropped in the last five years as evidence linking the sport to degenerative brain diseases has grown - and researchers can't help but endorse the shift +2

WHY BRAINS NEED WEEKS TO HEAL - EVEN FROM MINOR HITS
Every time a head gets hit, the brain is trying to recover.

Repeated hits to the head do not allow the brain to undergo its natural return to health.

Instead of a healthy clearance of toxins, it leads to inflammation, the precursor to Alzheimer's and CTE.

'Our body, and in particular our brain, has a great mechanism to heal,' Dr Stern explains.

'If you hit your head, then stop hitting your head, there are a lot of things going on in and around the cells that were hurt to help clear out some of the toxic substances.

'If you don't rest and you get hit the next day or the same day or a week later, or you have a few hundreds or thousands of those hits per season, your brain can't heal.

'Instead of that natural immune response to return the cells to health, that response becomes overwhelmed. That is what leads to CTE.'

THE LATEST RESEARCH: FOOTBALL-RELATED BRAIN INJURIES ARE WORSE IF YOU PLAYED AS A CHILD

Increasingly, research is showing that there is a window of time in which our brains' neurological development is particularly vulnerable: under the age of 12.

In 2017, Dr Stern and the other researchers - who are leading the vanguard of investigations into sport-linked brain diseases - produced concrete evidence that playing football from the age of 12 or younger is associated with cognitive and behavioral problems in later life.

Most importantly, they also showed that concussions and 'big' tackles are not the problem; any hit to the head is a problem if the player continues playing that day or the next day or even the next week, preventing the brain's natural healing process.

'Bigger hits that lead to people having significant symptoms, those are relatively rare, and at they are the tip of the iceberg. Beneath, you have the hundreds of hits per season that tackle football players receive,' he explains.

'People who play tackle football before the age of 12 had a much greater risk for having cognitive changes in mid-life as well as changes in mood and behavior.

'That doesn't mean that they have CTE, we don't know how to diagnose it in life yet but there's a strong connection between starting to play early and later in life problems.'

'IT'S LIKE HITTING YOUR CHILD OVER THE HEAD 200 TIMES A SEASON'

Dr Stern does not mince his words when asked if football is damaging for children.

In a lengthy hypothetical scenario, the esteemed neuropsychologist likens the sport to physical abuse.

'When I think about all of the incredible things we parents do to protect our kids from injuries, from illness, we do all kinds of crazy things,' Dr Stern mused.

'We go overboard to make sure that our kids have reached our best possible potential. That's what our society has done. We do everything we can to make pain go away.

'Then we drop, let's say little Johnny, a five-year-old boy, at a field.

'He puts on a helmet, this big plastic helmet with a face mask that makes him a bobble-head because his head is fully grown at that age but his body isn't. The weight of that sized helmet compared to this body is so huge compared to a fully-developed Johnny, and his neck cannot possibly have such control over such a big thing on his head.

'But then we say, 'ok listen to your coach, we want you to play hard, this is tackle football, don't be afraid'.


'Aaron Hernandez started playing tackle football before the age of nine. After his death at 27, he was diagnosed with the worst case of CTE despite only having two concussions on record

THE RATE OF KIDS IN FOOTBALL PLUMMETS - AS EVIDENCE OF BRAIN ISSUES GROW
The rate of children signing up to play American football has declined in the last five years, with that drop sharpening since CTE studies started to gain traction.

Even the Super Bowl's halftime act Justin Timberlake said his two-year-old son Silas will never play football in an awkward pre-match press conference last week.

According to a new poll by NBC and the Wall Street Journal, half of parents would prefer that their children play another sport than football.

Now, 53 percent of mothers (up from 40 percent in 2014) want their children to avoid football. Among fathers, that figure is lower at 39 percent - but a significant increase up from 33 percent in 2014.

'It certainly doesn't help that concussion is on a lot of moms' minds,' said Adam Campbell, coach of the youth football team at Chicago's Canaryville, told the Tribune.

'And I'm hearing it from dads who are saying, 'I played but I don't want my kids to play.''

'Johnny hits his head against his opponent or the ground an average of 200 or 300 times that season, with adequate force to induce that his brain is likely jostling back and forth with quick movement.

'Little Johnny doesn't feel any of these hits because he's wearing this big helmet and so there's no pain and there's no symptomatic concussion but little Johnny is being hit and his brain is being injured over and over and over again during a time of incredible maturation of the brain.

'So, wearing my Bob hat and not my Dr Stern hat, I have to ask the question: does it make sense to subject our children to countless hits to the head during a period of time when their brain is actively developing?

'It would be very similar to dropping Johnny off at the coach's house and saying, 'it's ok Johnny, this man is going to hit you in the head a couple of hundred times over the next couple of months'.

'That's the common-sense part, regardless of the science.'

But he is hardly the first researcher to posit such a scenario.

Dr Bennet Omalu, the researcher who is credited with first diagnosing CTE in a deceased NFL player, said youth football 'is the definition of child abuse'.

'If you play football, and if your child plays football, there is a 100 percent risk exposure. There is nothing like making football safer. That's a misnomer,' he added.

COULD 'FLAG FOOTBALL' FOR UNDER-14s MAKE IT BETTER?

Dr Stern and his team - who are leading the vanguard of investigations into football-linked brain diseases - work closely with various organizations including the Concussion Legacy Foundation (CLF), which has a new campaign to switch from tackle football to flag football for under-14s.

The aim of that campaign, back by three dementia-suffering ex-NFL players, is to curb the rate of concussions and brain diseases in children at a pivotal time of their brain development.

Chris Nowinski, a former college player and wrestling champion turned researcher who founded CLF, insists this is the best strategy.

'Playing youth tackle football increases your risk of developing CTE. Also, playing youth football before age 14 does not increase your chances of being an NFL legend,' Nowinski said.

'We're simply seeing more and more evidence that supports what we've said for a long time, which is that we need to delay contact in young athletes.

'It's true that there's a lot we don't know about CTE and traumatic brain injury, but what we do know, for certain, is that limiting the number of hits a player takes is a proven way to protect him or her.'

The campaign is backed by Nick Buoniconti, former middle linebacker for the Miami Dolphins, who now has dementia and the symptoms of CTE.

'I made a mistake starting tackle football at nine years old,' he said last week.

'Now, CTE has taken my life away. Youth tackle football is all risk with no reward.'

On paper, the flag football move could work. Football remains the most popular in America by far, easily eclipsing baseball, basketball and soccer.

If children stop enduring hundreds of head hits during that crucial window, it could be a game changer, allowing their brains to mature before they subject themselves to the trauma, marginally lowering their risk of later life problems.

However, Dr Stern warns he has yet to see a proposed change to youth football that would prevent all head hits, not just brutal concussion-inducing tackles.

'Everything is focusing on concussion and is not addressing the bigger issue that our research and countless other research groups are demonstrating,' Dr Stern warns.

'Sub-concussive hits are incredibly common in youth football and result in changes in the brain structures after just one season's play and affect cognitive function in later life, but are also associated with later life behavioral problems.'

He adds that there is a broader problem, which we still can't answer: even if you do limit head hits in that crucial window, could we prevent CTE? His feeling is: probably not.

'We human beings weren't meant to expose ourselves to repetitive impacts where our brain is getting jostled back and forth,' Dr Stern said.

'There's nothing in the history of humankind that involved these types of head impacts until the last 60 years or so, and in particular in terms of lots of people having this type of exposure.

'American tackle football with helmets and face masks didn't get used until the late 1950s. With the introduction of those helmets, there has been a likely sense of invincibility, leading to an increase in hits to the head, because before that it would hurt!'

www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-5354749/Do-NOT-let-child-swept-Super-Bowl.html#comments