New Delhi: At least 25 per cent of former National Football League, or NFL, players who died between 2016 and 2021 had chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a degenerative brain disease linked to repeated head impacts, states a study released on Tuesday. The NFL is the highest professional level of American football.
The study, published in the British Medical Journal (BMJ), was conducted by researchers from Mass General Brigham, Boston University, the Concussion & CTE Center and other US institutions. Of 878 former players who passed away from 2016 to 2021, 235 brains were donated and analysed, with 215 testing positive for chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE)—a whopping 91.5 per cent.
“At minimum, nearly a quarter of all former NFL players who died during 2016-21 had CTE neuropathology at death. Among NFL player brain donors, dementia diagnosed based on records before death was common and associated with stage IV CTE,” states the study.
‘Most head injuries occurred at school, college’
The study highlighted a strong, overlapping relationship between dementia and CTE among the former NFL players. Among all the brain donors who were diagnosed with CTE, 61.3 per cent met the clinical criteria for dementia before they died.
Looking at the data from the opposite direction, the researchers found that 95.5 per cent of the brain donors who had dementia also had CTE pathology. Meanwhile, players with Stage IV CTE (the most advanced stage of the disease) had a 44 per cent higher risk of dementia compared to those with lower stages, correlating directly with severe cognitive impairment and loss of daily functioning.
“The bulk of the head impacts that these former NFL players experienced didn’t occur at the NFL level,” the report’s lead author and an associate professor at Harvard Medical School, Daniel Daneshvar, told the BBC. “They occurred at the collegiate level and at the high school level and in many cases the youth level. And all of those cumulative hits to the head added up to result in an increased risk.”
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Safety rules
Researchers and health experts urged expanding safety rules and reducing contact practices to lower the risk of degenerative brain disease.
“The NFL continuously strives to make the game of football safer, including by implementing strategies to reduce concussions and head impacts,” an NFL spokesperson said. “The NFL remains committed to ensuring that the NFL community has access to a robust – and expanding – set of resources to enhance their physical and mental well being. We encourage former players to utilise these resources to identify and seek treatment when they are concerned about their health.”
In 2011, the NFL and the players’ association agreed to a new Collective Bargaining Agreement that significantly restricted full-contact practices.
“If the changes that have been implemented at the NFL level, including reducing the amount of contact in sports practices to less than one per week, were propagated at the collegiate, high school, and youth levels, athletes would be better off,” Daneshvar told The Guardian.