High Proportion of Deceased Football Players Found to Have CTE

A postmortem analysis of the brains of 202 former football players from the high-school to the professional level has revealed that 87% of these athletes had neuropathological signs of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) —a progressive neurodegenerative disorder associated with repetitive head trauma. Moreover, as reported today inJAMA, all but one of the brains of the former National Football League (NFL) players showed neuropathological signs of the disease.“Nearly all of the former NFL players in this study had CTE pathology, and this pathology was frequently severe,” wrote senior author Ann McKee, M.D., of the Boston University (BU) CTE Center and colleagues. “These findings suggest that CTE may be related to prior participation in football and that a high level of play may be related to substantial disease burden.” McKee and colleagues evaluated samples that were donated to a brain bank established in collaboration between the BU School of Medicine, the Boston and Bedford Veterans Administration Systems, and Concussion Legacy Foundation. A neuropathological diagnosis was made using criteria for CTE defined by an expert panel organized by the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke and National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering in 2015. Retrospective clinical evaluations were performed using online surveys and structured and semi-structured postmortem telephone interviews between researchers and next of kin.CTE was identi...
Source: Psychiatr News - Category: Psychiatry Tags: Ann McKee chronic traumatic encephalopathy CTE football neurodegeneration NFL Source Type: research