Study Finds at Least a Quarter of Former NFL Players Who Participated Had a Degenerative Brain Disease at Death
· Yahoo Sports
Credit: Jeff Siner/Charlotte Observer/MCT
NEED TO KNOW
- A study found over 91% of NFL players who donated their brains to research had chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE)
- The degenerative brain disease is linked to repeated head injuries and gets worse over time
- The NFL said in a statement to the BBC that it “continuously strives to make the game of football safer”
At least a quarter of all former National Football League (NFL) players who participated in a study and died between 2016 and 2021 were found to have a degenerative brain disease.
Of the 878 NFL players who died in those five years, 235 donated their brains to research, per a study published in the British Medical Journal (BMJ).
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Over 91% of those donated brains (215) were diagnosed with chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a type of brain disease likely caused by repeated head injuries, according to the Mayo Clinic.
The disease causes the nerve cells in the brain to die and gets worse over time. CTE can only be definitively diagnosed with an autopsy of the brain after death, the Mayo Clinic added.
Brain scans (stock image)Credit: Getty
The study authors assessed that this figure equates to a “minimum” CTE prevalence of 24.5% among athletes who died in that time period, with a “maximum prevalence” of over 97%.
Researchers also found that dementia was “common among donors and associated with stage IV CTE.”
“We and others have shown that in NFL players, specifically, there is about a four times higher rate of death from neurodegenerative disease than the general population,” Daniel Daneshvar, the lead author and associate professor at Harvard Medical School, told the BBC.
“The bulk of the head impacts that these former NFL players experienced didn’t occur at the NFL level,” Daneshvar added.
An NFL football (stock image)Credit: Nic Antaya/Getty
He said many of the impacts occurred at the college, high school or even youth level of the sport, according to Reuters via The Guardian.
Every player involved in the BMJ study was a former football player who played at least one NFL game.
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The NFL told the BBC it “continuously strives to make the game of football safer” by “implementing strategies to reduce concussions and head impacts.”
The league limited the number of contact practices during each season in the 2011 collective bargaining agreement, according to Reuters via The Guardian.
In 2016, coaches from all eight Ivy League schools voted to ban full-contact hitting from regular season practices, per the New York Times.
The NFL did not immediately respond to PEOPLE’s request for comment.
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