The New York Times has a heartbreaking story of loss. This link should allow full access. The issue of Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (C.T.E.) is of increasing concern as studies are finding it in places that had been overlooked — until now.
They started playing football as young as six.
They died in their teens and twenties with C.T.E.
Warning: This article contains videos and photos that are traumatic. It opens with a young man, Wyatt Bramwell, recording a message to his parents explaining why he felt compelled to take his own life, and asking them to donate his brain to research to find out if the damage he had taken over the years might explain it. He was about to enter college, but never made it.
The rest of the article has interviews with parents talking about the children they’ve lost, videos of their children playing tackle football at an early age, their love of the game, and the questions they are now dealing with. It’s very difficult to watch — but these parents are to be thanked for sharing what has to be a terrible loss so that others may learn from it.
From the article:
They all died young. Most played football. Only a few came close to reaching the pros.
But like hundreds of deceased N.F.L. players — including the Pro Football Hall of Famers Mike Webster, Junior Seau and Ken Stabler — they, too, had C.T.E., the degenerative brain disease linked to repeated hits to the head. For now, it can be positively diagnosed only posthumously.
The brains of Bramwell and 151 other young contact-sport athletes, both men and women, are part of a study recently released by researchers at Boston University.
Researchers examined 152 brains of contact-sport athletes who died before turning 30.
Of the 152 athletes studied, more than 40% had C.T.E.
While 152 may seem like a small sample size, the findings are still significant. The incidence of C.T.E. — nearly half — is of concern. Investigations into this age group are only getting started, and subjects were people who had extreme outcomes. The possibility that the prevalence of C.T.E. is more widespread but unknown may be because it goes undetected in people whose symptoms are less severe, and because there are as yet no easy ways to diagnose it definitively short of actually taking the brain out posthumously and examining it.
This press release from Boston University about the study has more information about what they found. Although The New York Times focused on football, the study included other contact sports.
After examining the brains of 152 contact sport participants who had died under age 30, they discovered 41.4 percent had signs of CTE. More than 70 percent of those diagnosed were amateur athletes who’d played sports like football, ice hockey, soccer, rugby, and wrestling. The study also included the first American female athlete diagnosed with CTE, a 28-year-old collegiate soccer player whose identity remains private. The results were published in JAMA Neurology.
emphasis added
The researchers found that even where C.T.E. was not detected, there were other indications of concern.
The researchers, who conducted detailed interviews with the donors’ relatives, also determined most of the athletes were suffering from clinical symptoms during their short lives, even if they didn’t have CTE. More than 70 percent of them had apathy and a similar number were depressed, while more than half had difficulty controlling their behavior; many also had issues with substance use.
“Those symptoms might be a result of the head injury itself,” says McKee, a BU Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine professor of neurology and pathology, a William Fairfield Warren Distinguished Professor, and a chief of neuropathology at the VA Boston Healthcare System. “The study suggests that some of the symptoms these young athletes are experiencing are not caused by the early tau pathology of CTE. The head impacts themselves might cause damage to the white matter and vascular injury, a breach of the blood-brain barrier.”
She and her team concluded that even just a couple of more years on the field made a big difference. Those diagnosed with CTE played, on average, for an additional 3.8 years more than those without it.
The New York Times article videos are painful to watch. The parents and the kids loved the sports they were playing. For some of them they saw sports as a ticket to college, or even a professional career. It’s also part of the ideal for kids to participate in sports to develop social ties, learn teamwork, and engage in healthy exercise — or at least it was thought to be healthy. Parents, coaches, players — everyone needs to be aware of this danger and act appropriately. It’s going to take some time for this news to get around and there is bound to be resistance.
The Times article includes this information at the end:
If you are having thoughts of suicide, call or text 988 to reach the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline or go to SpeakingOfSuicide.com for a list of additional resources.
The 152 brains in the Boston University study belonged to contact-sports athletes who died before turning 30. They were donated between 2008 and 2022 to the UNITE Brain Bank.
C.T.E. started getting attention when the number of professional football players and former players who were manifesting serious mental issues and being lost to suicide became too great to ignore. Every week of the professional football season includes news about which players have been put on Injured Reserve. Every game includes the spectacle of players limping off or being carried off the field.
Injuries to the brain are more insidious than a busted knee or bruised throwing arm. While a player being knocked unconscious is pretty hard to ignore, lesser impacts can still have a cumulative effect. It’s hard not to ask when “the glory of the game” turns into a kind of human sacrifice.