Most people don’t have autopsies done after they die. And, CTE has to be discovered via microscopic examination of brain tissue – which, unless the person doing the autopsy has reason to believe that brain damage was a factor, may not be done.
It wasn’t until the past 15 years or so, with the work of Dr. Bennet Omalu and others, that researchers and physicians were even thinking to look at the brains of former players in this way.
I don’t know what to say. 80 plus years of contact sports in school is a massive sample size. There’s a lot of perfectly well adjusted former school athletes that went on to fullfilling careers and lives afterwards.
I don’t dispute they are seeing something in microscopic examinations of brain tissue.
But we know from observing our own relatives and classmates that they don’t exhibit extreme CTE symptoms. Whatever CTE they have isn’t affecting their lives. It’s nothing like the horror stories former pro athletes tell.
Many of these behaviors are common in people that never played sports.
I understand with CTE these get extreme
Here is some actual knowledge about CTE injuries:
CTE found in 99% of studied brains from deceased NFL players
And from the noted doctor that originally discovered the link between CTE and NFL players: CTE NFL Doctor says children playing football is child abuse
The entire reason we have science is because common sense isn’t good enough.
Try again.
I guess that something that wasn’t looked for for eighty years because the proper equipment didn’t exist yet, combined with a monetary need to downplay injuries of this sort means that it just didn’t exist before the truth was uncovered, right? :dubious:
“I understand that with CTE these get extreme” is quite a jump from what that link actually said:
(italics mine) You keep saying that it’s obvious when someone has CTE injuries, but that’s just not true at all.
Just to note that that study, while alarming, isn’t a random sample of former players. That 99% figure is of players whose brains were closely studied after their deaths, to look for CTE – players (or their families, or their doctors) who believed that something was going wrong, and requested that the brains be studied.
The incidence of CTE among all former NFL players is likely to be something less than 99% (though, I believe, probably still far higher than what one would see among the general population).
You’ve never seen former star athletes from high school who seemingly had it all, but never managed to make anything of themselves, and bummed around with dead end jobs and turned to the bottle? I think Bruce Springsteen alone has written 14 songs about this phenomenon.
Acknowledged, but I just wanted to add that study to the others out there.
THis whole post is filled with unsupported declarations of, shall we say, dubious veracity, but your last paragraph takes the cake. Exactly what percentage of people who play in the NFL do you think play for “12 plus years”? Did you pick that number because you thought it was somehow representative of reality? 
:dubious: It isn’t. The average NFL career lasts just 3.3 years. The number of people playing for “12 plus years” in pro football is amazingly small.
To be fair, I suspect that he was including playing at lower levels in that “12 plus years.”
If we make the assumption that an NFL player played the game throughout high school and college (a reasonable assumption, in most but not all cases), and possibly in middle school, that’d mean that the typical professional player might have 8-10 years of football in his past before joining the NFL.
Soccer players use their head a lot - I was just at the US Open Cup match (go SKC!), and there was one sequence where there were 8 (or more - a lot at any rate) head strikes in a row - it really looked like a volleyball game with the ball never touching the ground.
Aceplace57: do you concede an association between cigarette smoking and cancer? If you do, do you realize how long it took for the medical world and the general public to recognize this association?
The same could well be true with school sports and C.T.E.
Remember that it isn’t just head injuries that cause CTE. Any sudden impact to the body that can make the head jerk around adds to the problem…and the damage is cumulative, so you have to start the clock at when a person first starts these activities.
Sense is never common.
Common sense in practice is nothing more than a bunch of biases collected over the years and assumed to be true. Scientific examination of those assumed truths is the only way to establish if they are true. A very high degree of them are found to be false. Yet these cherished beliefs continue to be strongly held by many, despite objective evidence to the contrary.
The thinking person lets go of their biases and examines the evidence. The non-thinking person rejects the evidence in favor of their belief.
Which are you?
Exactly.
I was counting junior high, high school, college, and few years in the NFL. That’s a lot of time for cumulative head injuries. No one walks away from the NFL completely unscathed.
Everyone agrees that more head injuries results in a worse outcome in the person’s later life? Right?
Since you haven’t defined what you mean by “later life”, I cannot agree. How can a head injury when the skull is thinner and softer and the brain is still developing be less injurious than a brain injury when one is an adult?
edited to add: The times in history when “everyone agreed” can be counted on the fingers of one foot.
Qadgop - a question, Doctor: are you saying that CTE is an “accelerant”? So if someone grows up a Bad Seed, acquiring CTE is only going to reinforce those Bad Seed behaviors, yes?
Just making an observation. But I wager that for some, it brings out behavior they’d have been able to suppress had they not had brain injuries.
A lot of being an adult is due to the brain finally getting mature enough to keep in check its own more primitive drives.
The total person and their behavior is the result of many, many different factors though.
New article about how Football Can Damage Kids’ Brains — Even If They Don’t Get Concussions.
I thought it was the other way around.