"For their study, the researchers analyzed postmortem brain tissue from four military service members who were known to have been injured by a blast or had a concussive injury. The scientists compared that tissue with brain tissue samples from three young amateur American football players and a professional wrestler, all of whom had a history of repetitive concussive injury, and with four samples from comparably aged control subjects with no history of blast exposure, concussive injury or neurological disease. The signs of CTE (which can only be diagnosed postmortem) in the brains of blast-exposed military veterans were indistinguishable from those found in the deceased athletes, according to the researchers, led by Lee Goldstein, an associate professor at Boston University School of Medicine (B.U.S.M.) and Boston University College of Engineering, and Ann McKee, a B.U.S.M. professor and director of the Neuropathology Service for the VA New England Healthcare System."
http://www.scientificamerican.com/...
"Violence as both a cause and a consequence of TBI is a serious problem. TBI professionals can play an important role in educating domestic violence workers, health care providers, and other professionals, including those in law enforcement, about ways to better identify and assist persons who experience violence. Additional research is needed to better quantify the extent of the problem and to ensure that screening methods for identifying a history of TBI are valid and reliable."
http://www.brainline.org/...
"Reasons for Violent Behaviour
We all tend to let our hair down with family, as opposed to strangers or acquaintances. Of course, after a brain injury a person's interpretation of letting hair down may be well beyond what most would consider acceptable, particularly if their self-awareness has been affected. They may justify their violence by saying that others provoked them, not realising that the brain injury has increased their sensitivity to stress and decreased their ability to handle it.
The frontal lobe is often damaged in brain injury. This area of the brain is involved in reasoning, problem solving and controlling our more basic instincts such as anger. An individual who has sustained a brain injury has often lost these skills and therefore may have trouble controlling anger and violent outbursts. In many cases brain injured individuals often lose some of their social judgement capabilities and are not effectively able to reason out the appropriateness of either their own behaviour or the behaviour they expect from others."
http://synapse.org.au/...
Are NFL players tested for brain damage before they are hired?