The brains of deceased former football players used to trickle in to the CTE Center at Boston University. But the spate of publicity about CTE and the worried families wanting to know the truth about their late football-playing loved ones have increased the donations in recent years so that now about 600 brains of former players at all levels of football have been sent to the BU facility for examination. “We’re getting four times the donations we were getting five years ago,” said Chris Nowinski, co-founder of the Concussion Legacy Institute. Not all have been studied yet. In a recent study by the Annals of Neurology publication, we learned:
• In examining 266 deceased former players, 223 were found to meet the criteria for CTE—about 83 percent.
• The fact that 43 former players did not test for CTE (chronic traumatic encephalopathy, which is characterized by a dangerous protein, Tau, being found in the brain) wasn’t particularly encouraging to Nowinski. “Just as some people who smoke cigarettes for 50 years do not get lung cancer, not everyone who played football for years gets CTE,” he said.
• The risk of CTE doubles per every year 2.6 years playing tackle football.
• Being diagnosed with CTE is more a function of the number of years a person plays tackle football, not the number of concussions a player suffers.
• Nowinski and his foundation are beginning a campaign called “Tackle Can Wait,” featuring a PSA of young boys in football uniforms smoking cigarettes. The theory: It’s as dangerous for a child’s health to play tackle football for his long-term health as it is for a child to smoke cigarettes. Nowinski is recommending that parents not allow their children to play tackle football till at least age 14.
“My gut says this issue is more widespread than we thought it was,” Nowinski said. “But I think we have a tremendous opportunity for preventing CTE going forward. Do you really need to start playing tackle football at 5 or 6, with all the information that’s out there about the damage it can cause at such a young age? We’re starting the new campaign to try to educate parents to wait to enroll their children till high school in tackle football. There’s still a million kids playing [tackle] at a young age, and progress [in promoting flag over tackle] is moving slower than I expected. Most people, once you get on the tackle train, you don’t get off. We need to get to the parents. Once you look at this data, you’re going to have a make a serious decision for your child.”
