What Hockey Players Fear: Ending Up With Brain Damage (CTE) Like Football Players

Let me say (1) the all-American boy in the photo is not the topic of this post and (2) the photo contains enough material to support a PhD thesis on the sociology of sport. If the photo hadn't come from a reputable paper, you'd want to hope it was 'shopped.

This is the story of hockey player/enforcer Bob Probert, who died of heart failure in July 2010 at age 45. From the NY Times:

After examining Probert’s brain tissue, researchers at Boston University said this week that they found the same degenerative disease, chronic traumatic encephalopathy, whose presence in more than 20 deceased professional football players has prompted the National Football League to change some rules and policies in an effort to limit dangerous head impacts.

“How much is the hockey and how much is the fighting, we don’t really know,” said Dr. Robert Cantu, co-director of the Boston University center and a prominent neurosurgeon in the area of head trauma in sports. “We haven’t definitely established that the skills of hockey as a sport lead to a certain percentage of participants developing C.T.E. But it can happen to hockey players, and while they’re still relatively young.”

“In my heart of hearts, I don’t believe fighting is what did this to Bob,” said Dani Probert, Bob Probert’s widow. “It was hockey — all the checking and hits, things like that.”

Many athletes later found with C.T.E. — whose test for abnormal protein deposits in brain tissue can be administered only after death — presented symptoms like drug abuse, impulse control and impaired memory only in the years before they died, suggesting that the disease contributed to it.

Dani Probert said that her husband was aware of growing concern about C.T.E. among athletes in contact sports, and that they had discussed it soon before he died after a “60 Minutes” feature on the subject.

“I remember joking with him, ‘Wouldn’t your brain make a nice specimen?’ ” she said. “He started questioning whether he would have it himself.

He told me that he wanted to donate his brain to the research when he died.

Who would have thought that six months later it would be happening?

Chris Nowinski, a co-director of the Boston University research group, said that 10 other professional hockey players, almost all of whom played in the N.H.L., had pledged to donate their brains upon death. More than 100 professional football players have done the same, including Dave Duerson, the former Chicago Bears star and players union official who committed suicide two weeks ago.

From the Feb.20 NY Times:

When the former football player Andre Waters shot himself in the head in late 2006, the few recoverable pieces of brain tissue, which later showed the same degenerative disease previously associated only with boxers, made the health risks of football a national conversation.

Football’s ramifications so concerned the former Chicago Bear Dave Duerson that, after

deciding to kill himself last Thursday, he shot himself in the chest, apparently so that his brain could remain intact for similar examination

.

This intent, strongly implied by text messages Duerson sent to family members soon before his death, has injected a new degree of fear in the minds of many football players and their families, according to interviews with them Sunday.

Randy Cross, a former San Francisco 49ers lineman, said, “It ought to terrify anyone that’s played the game.”

Duerson sent text messages to his family before he shot himself specifically requesting that his brain be examined for damage, two people aware of the messages said. Another person close to Duerson, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said that Duerson had commented to him in recent months that he might have C.T.E., an incurable disease linked to depression, impaired impulse control and cognitive decline.

Here's a statement of how strange it is: Hockey players are afraid they're going to end up like football players.

I would like to ask people who send their kids to play these games (in organized arenas with pads and helmets, where they're encouraged to hit hard): What are you doing?

Football: Organized, Voluntary Brain Damage

There's an excellent article in Sunday's Post-Gazette titled, "A career of concussions: Football damaged my brain and it didn't have to happen", by George Visger, a former San Francisco 49er (1980, 1981).

Mr. Visger, who has had nine brain surgeries attributed to his 13 years of football experience¹, has written an open letter to NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell and NFLPA Executive Director DeMaurice Smith. He also contributes to discussions about football injuries.

Money quote from the Post-Gazette article: "It's time we realize the human brain was not meant to be used as a weapon or repeatedly banged into the ground."

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¹ Seems significant that Mr. Visger calculates his time of damaging behavior as "13 years of football", starting from his 11-year-old Pee Wee Pop Warner experience (and his first of many concussions) and ending with his two seasons of professional football.

Football, Fracking, Folly: stupid things we keep doing.

Three stories in the overall category, "why do we do such stupid things?"

Football and Brain Injuries

The brain of the late Cincinnati receiver Chris Henry contained so many signs of chronic disease... that it shows a football player can sustain life-altering head trauma without ever being diagnosed with a concussion.

Dr. Bennet Omalu: "I'm not calling for the eradication of football; no, I'm asking for full disclosure to the players. Like the surgeon general considers smoking to be dangerous to your health, repeated impacts of the brain are dangerous to your health and will affect you later in life. Period. The players need to know this.

"I think it's an epidemic. It's beneath the radar. We simply didn't identify it [early and properly].

"The NFL wants us to believe that documented concussions are the issue. I've always believed that it's not about documented concussions. It's about repeated impacts to the head ... sub-concussions," Dr. Omalu said. "The issue is repeated impact, repeated blows to the head."

Encouraging children to play football is so reckless that it makes soccer and the World Cup seem rational.

What a fracking mess

Today's Vanity Fair presents an account of fracking operations in Damascus, PA and Dimock, PA in order to exploit the natural gas found in the Marcellus Shale. Both towns are in the Delaware River basin watershed.

The story tells about one family whose (post-fracking) well-water eroded their plates in the dishwasher, made their children dizzy after they took showers, and eventually could be set on fire as it came out of the faucet.

Folly: Losing Afghanistan

Today's Economist (reg. req'd) talks about our failure in Afganistan. Although we're ostensibly fighting the Taliban and al Queda, the corrupt Karzai government has announced plans to seek a diplomatic rapprochement with them. Karzai is also manuevering with Pakistan to cement his Pashtun tribe's power.

Even Henry Kissinger (the godfather of American Realpolitik) says that what we're doing and saying is a formula for failure. I'm all for killing bad guys over there, but I'm not convinced that we're not creating more bad guys than we're killing.

I really, really, really hate to quote John Kerry, but his rhetoric fits this situation perfectly. How do you ask somebody to be the last man to die for a mistake? How can we tell a grieving parent that the loss was justified, when the Afghan president and congress are both cutting deals with the purported enemy?

What High School Football Players Need -- More Brain Damage

When you look for thought-leaders in Pennsylvania football, when you look for the folks who shape young people before they get to the pro teams, you think about the head coaches at Pitt, Penn State, and Temple. When the Roethlisberger scandal brings public focus to the arrogant thuggery of some athletes, and the tendency for athletes to believe that normal rules don't apply to them, I expected these head coaches to exert their leadership among their youthful charges and set the bar for acceptable behavior. Take the initiative, set a new standard, etc; do the "vision thing".



The Pitt and Penn State head coaches got together Wednesday and made a public call for: football practice in the spring time, so that Pennsylvania kids will be able to keep up with athletes from states that already have spring training for football.

From the Post-Gazette: "Penn State coach Joe Paterno and Pitt coach Dave Wannstedt today met with the executive board of the Pennsylvania State Football Coaches Association (PSFCA) and offered their support for the plan, which has not yet been proposed to the PIAA. Temple coach Al Golden also backs the idea, but he could not attend today's meeting at the Lasch Football Building."

When I think about football players, I think about Steeler "Iron Mike" Webster who suffered from amnesia, dementia, depression, and acute bone and muscle pain. At the end he lived out of his pickup truck or train stations until he died at a young age, a victim of all those hits to his head. He had chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE.

Research indicates that head trauma is a cumulative function. From Wikipedia: It has been speculated that Webster's ailments were due to wear and tear sustained over his playing career; some doctors estimated he had been in the equivalent of "25,000 automobile crashes" in over 25 years of playing football at the high school, college and professional levels.

I recommend Malcolm Gladwell's excellent article, Offensive Play, for an interesting read. In one paragraph discussing the football controversy in 1905 (yes, 1905) a professor at the University of Chicago called it a “boy-killing, man-mutilating, money-making, education-prostituting, gladiatorial sport". The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Gladwell talks about a program at the University of North Carolina called the Sports Concussion Research Program. The SCRP uses a program called HITS to put sensors in the helmets of every UNC football player, and measures every g-force impact the player's brain receives. The HITS data suggest that practice — the routine part of the sport — can be as dangerous as the football games themselves.

A football player’s real issue isn’t simply with repetitive concussive trauma. It is, as the concussion specialist Robert Cantu argues, with repetitive subconcussive trauma. It’s not just the handful of big hits that matter. It’s lots of little hits, too.

That’s why so many of the ex-players who have been given a diagnosis of C.T.E. were linemen: line play lends itself to lots of little hits. The HITS data suggest that, in an average football season, a lineman could get struck in the head a thousand times, which means that a ten-year N.F.L. veteran, when you bring in his college and high-school playing days, could well have been hit in the head eighteen thousand times: that’s thousands of jarring blows that shake the brain from front to back and side to side, stretching and weakening and tearing the connections among nerve cells, and making the brain increasingly vulnerable to long-term damage.

Football leagues now hire mobile scanning units to get baseline scans on young players' heads so that years later, comparisons can be made. Here's a nutty thought: any activity that asks high school kids to pose for "before" pictures to measure subsequent brain damage should be considered child abuse.

When I think about what football players need, two things come to mind:

1. they need to be taught that they're not demigods above civil society
2. they need to be protected from the edutainment industry that profits from their smashing their brains against hard objects.

Paterno and Wannstedt might have called for fewer full-contact sessions per year. They could have taken action to improve their student's chances of not ending up like Mike Webster. They should have instituted a zero-tolerance policy for sexual assault or offenses involving drinking.

Instead, they used their positions of responsibility to encourage Pennsylvania high school students to smash their heads more often. Here we go Steelers, here we go...