WASHINGTON.- At least a quarter of the players in the professional American football league (NFL) could end up with a degenerative brain disease, according to a new study published Tuesday that exposes the enormous cost of the favorite sport of the USA.
Chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) is caused by repeated blows to the head and its symptoms include cognitive impairment, difficulty walking, emotional instability, and suicidal thoughts.
CTE has previously been linked to contact sports such as football and boxing, and has also been found in members of the military exposed to explosions.
But because CTE can only be confirmed by a post-mortem brain examination, its true extent among NFL players remains uncertain.
According to this new study, led by Daniel Daneshvarprofessor of the Harvard Medical Schooland published in the British Medical Journal, Researchers analyzed the brains of deceased players who had played at least one NFL game in the mandatory plastic helmet era, which began in 1949.
The main finding comes from people who died between 2016 and 2021, when brain donations were more frequent. Of the 878 deaths in that period, 235 donated their brains for testing and 215 had CTE confirmed.
That means that, at a minimum, the CTE rate was 24.5% if none of the brains that were not analyzed had had the disease. The high estimate was 97.7%, and the actual figure is probably somewhere in between.
Dementia
The researchers also evaluated the severity of the disease and found a relationship between high-grade CTE and dementia, with the latter determined from the players’ medical notes and interviews with their families.
“Taken together, these findings indicate that NFL players have a higher prevalence of CTE at death than has previously been shown in multiple community studies,” the authors wrote.
“These data indicate that the severity of CTE at the time of death is significantly associated with dementia in brain donors from NFL players and that dementia is common in these donors,” they added.
But the researchers also acknowledge several limitations, including that not all former NFL players who died during the study window were included and that some family members may have had inaccurate or exaggerated recall of symptoms.
In an editorial related to the topic, the professors Tobias Kurthof the Berlin University Medical Centerand Richard Rileyof the National Institute for Health and Care Research Birminghampraised the study design.
No single study can fully define the rate of CTE among NFL players, but “Daneshvar and colleagues provide one of the most informative estimates to date,” they noted.
Above all, they argued, it is essential to regularly communicate scientific evidence to past, present and future NFL players.
