PBS' Frontline series is reporting that what has been strongly suspected is backed up by the scientific data:
Researchers with the Department of Veterans Affairs and Boston University have now identified the degenerative disease known as chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, in 96 percent of NFL players that they’ve examined and in 79 percent of all football players. The disease is widely believed to stem from repetitive trauma to the head, and can lead to conditions such as memory loss, depression and dementia.
In total, the lab has found CTE in the brain tissue in 131 out of 165 individuals who, before their deaths, played football either professionally, semi-professionally, in college or in high school.
The caveats are that the disease is best identified after someone has died and the football players who have donated their brains to this science suspected, in life, that they were suffering from the disease.
Even with those caveats, the latest numbers are “remarkably consistent” with past research from the center suggesting a link between football and long-term brain disease, said Dr. Ann McKee, the facility’s director and chief of neuropathology at the VA Boston Healthcare System.
“People think that we’re blowing this out of proportion, that this is a very rare disease and that we’re sensationalizing it,” said McKee, who runs the lab as part of a collaboration between the VA and BU. “My response is that where I sit, this is a very real disease. We have had no problem identifying it in hundreds of players.”
It has been apparent to many for a long time now that this issue is the "climate change" of the National Football League. Where climate deniers say this is a natural occurrence in the Earth's lifecycle, the NFL have tied to argue that people get Alzheimer's disease and dementia and who is to say banging your head over and over again for years (sometimes hundreds of times a day) has any effect on what's inside of your head?