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110 N.F.L. Brains

• ggreer 9y ago
  Playing football is almost certainly bad for your brain, but this article does a terrible job of making that case. The doctor in charge of the study says as much: > The set of players posthumously tested by Dr. McKee is far from a random sample of N.F.L. retirees. “There’s a tremendous selection bias,” she has cautioned, noting that many families have donated brains specifically because the former player showed symptoms of C.T.E. This is equivalent to finding NFL players who showed signs of cancer, and then testing them for cancer. Of course you're going to get a rate close to 100%. The article takes 10 paragraphs before pointing out that the rate of CTE among former NFL players is much lower. This sort of sloppy journalism is counterproductive. It makes it much easier for football fans to discredit and ignore the problem. At best, it causes people to endorse good policies for bad reasons.
  • saulrh 9y ago
    9% chance, the best possible case given the current data, of a horrible, slow, lingering death 20 years later is still unacceptable. What's the rate for getting mesothelioma after working with asbestos?
    • gpawl 9y ago
      Football pays better than mesothelioma settlements.
      • kasey_junk 9y ago
        Does it pay better than a career as a dockworker or insulation installer over the course of each career? Did it when the people being impacted by CTE today played? I think most people overestimate the career earnings of the average football player and especially don't discount for the dramatic increase in pay that happened in the last 20 years?
        • slg 9y ago
          Or the fact that an overwhelming majority of football players don't ever collect a paycheck. It isn't like all of these NFL players just started receiving brain damage once they reached the NFL at the age of 22. They probably started playing football in their early teens. Odds are no one else on that player's middle or high school teams and only a hand full of people on their college team made the NFL. Yet they were all subject to the same type of head trauma.
          • tedunangst 9y ago
            Something like 6% of HS students play football. If 9% of them get CTE, that'd be a huge number of people.
            • Retric 9y ago
              Well presumably the risks are much less after 1-3 years vs 10+.
    • Goladus 9y ago
      Unacceptable to whom? Is the US a free country or not?
      • deelowe 9y ago
        I thought this was pretty obvious. The OP was implying that it's comparatively unacceptable given what's happened for other professions. Also, let's not forget that there's accusations of a cover up by the NFL.
      • saulrh 9y ago
        Well, we already ban: * Selling cigarettes to children * Building buildings that burn to the ground with everyone trapped inside * Murder So... I guess that America isn't a free country? If everyone was a perfectly informed perfectly rational expectation maximizer we wouldn't have any of these problems. But since none of those things are true, there're all sorts of predatory and greedy-counterproductive practices that are, yes, unacceptable, things that we have to ban for our civilization to continue to improve. I submit that american football, in its current form, is likely one of them. Too much glamour, too much money, too much tradition, too good at messing with people's heads, both in the way it sucks everyone into it (high school football!) and with the brain damage thing.
        • Goladus 9y ago
          We don't ban selling cigarettes to adults, and tobacco use has plummeted since 1965. Building codes affect the general public. There is a clear and direct link between owner negligence and public harm. Building codes also help to reduce fraud and sheer incompetence among builders. It is easy to describe situations where fraud and criminal negligence leads to death and property damage to other people (not just yourself). Meanwhile there are plenty of dangerous occupations, truck drivers, for example, that are not deemed unacceptable and banned by authoritarian morality police. > If everyone was a perfectly informed perfectly rational expectation maximizer we wouldn't have any of these problems This standard is hardly necessary. All that is necessary is to have sufficient information to take responsibility for decisions you make and their consequences. That is known as agency. Of course it's different if your decisions affect others. I could certainly see holding certain people or organizations (like the NFL) responsible if there has been some kind of cover-up about the long-term effects of concussions. But that's far different from a crude authoritarian ban. > I submit that american football, in its current form, is likely one of them. Too much glamour, too much money, too much tradition, too good at messing with people's heads, both in the way it sucks everyone into it (high school football!) and with the brain damage thing. In other words, you don't like football and you don't like the tradition, so you see no problem banning it. For you there's no downside, only upside. No, banning is not necessary, at least not some kind of national ban issued from on high. It starts with education. Parents stop letting their children play Pop Warner. High schoolers in most of the country decide not to take the risks of playing football. HS football programs decline. College recruiting pools dry up, leading to a decline in the quality and popularity of College football. From there, it's anyone's guess how the NFL will survive. Sure, it won't happen overnight. But I can assure you that the consequences of trying to issue an overnight ban of the most popular sport in the US would not be pretty.
    • sillysaurus3 9y ago
      Everything is unacceptable nowadays. The word has lost meaning. It's fine to inform someone of the risks. An informed society is better than a society that doesn't let you play football.
      • accountyaccount 9y ago
        That's like saying an informed society is better than a society that doesn't have OSHA regulations... You can't dangle millions of dollars in front of (often poor, often minority) college students and say "well you were informed of the risks" and then wash your hands of all responsibility. I could inform you that you'll die 1/6 times you play russian roulette, but that doesn't mean that it should be ethically sound (or legal) to pay you to take that chance.
        • urethrafranklin 9y ago
          You're welcome to your opinion but I find it un-goddamned-American. This country was built on the ability to do risky things for a chance at a payout!
        • jychang 9y ago
          IIRC, the calculations from NASA says that for a trained individual, the value of a human life is around $50 million. 1/6 of that is $8.3 million. It may be unethical to play russian roulette, but is it still unethical to choose to play if you were paid $8.3 million (given that much worth in utility) first? Why not? On the other hand, mining for minerals also has risk. Miners in Australia are highly compensated for it, getting paid over $100,000 per year. What difference is there between the scenarios, assuming everyone involved is fully informed?
          • accountyaccount 9y ago
            I feel like it boils down to options a bit. If I don't take the opportunity to work in Australian mines, will I have a reasonable opportunity to find work and provide a comfortable living for my family? If that answer would change whether or not I'd work in a mine, I'd consider that the work may be exploitative of a regional work shortage. At that point someone might feel as though sacrificing their health is their only option, and an informed decision is much harder to make. Like many ethical questions, it warrants discussion even though there may not be a "right" answer either way.
    • deleted 9y ago
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    • wahern 9y ago
      I can't put together a simple number based on the papers I'm finding, especially if we're limited to mesothelioma. Cancer risks are reported in units of f/mL.yr (fibers per milliliter of air per year) or f/g (embedded fibers per gram of dry lung tissue). And there's a huge range to occupational exposure, which I'm not capable of relating back to the risk numbers. (I don't have the numerical skills.) But suffice it to say that, surprisingly, AFAICT for even exceptionally heavy occupational exposure (e.g. mining asbestos or removing asbestos insulation) lifetime risks of developing mesothelioma seem to be well below 10%, and possibly even below 1%.
      • tptacek 9y ago
        That's the modern risk, right? Taking into account all the things those professions do to mitigate the risk? If you've seen someone remove asbestos in the past 20 years, it's obviously not as if they're just wearing jeans and a t-shirt and hauling armloads of the stuff.
        • burger_moon 9y ago
          Now we have ceramic wool which doesn't have regulations like asbestos does but is still a known carcinogen and the handling of it is done without any PPE.
          • tptacek 9y ago
            Right, but the comparison being made here is between football and asbestos removal, which is a profession people have today. The subtext was, "even asbestos removal has a lower risk of health problems than football". But I think that comparison may be confounded by the fact that the modern asbestos removal profession is organized around safety. In other words, that asbestos removal is not a good comparison point for high-risk professions.
            • saulrh 9y ago
              I was specifically thinking about historical methods for asbestos installation. I don't know the numbers exactly. I know that modern methods for handling hazmats like asbestos are good enough that it's basically not a risk factor. However, I suspected, based on the lack of "My grandfather got X and died" stories, that even old-timey asbestos handling protocols did not have a particularly huge rate. A visible rate, yes, but not something like coal mining sans PPE, mercury, or tritium, where the occupation effectively guarantees your cause of death. I chose asbestos because it was the most visible example that came to mind of something that had a relatively low rate but that most people would agree needed to be shut down for the health and safety of the workers involved with it. I'll note that the "lifetime risk" numbers in the first response are almost certainly historical. I'd expect the studies he's looking to have been published around the time modern handling standards were developed, and they may have even contributed to their implementation. The symptoms also take decades to manifest, so I'd expect modern rates to be good indicators of the safety of the industry circa 20-30 years ago and nearly useless for indicating modern standards. 50 years ago probably not, but 20 years is probably still good.
    • dsfyu404ed 9y ago
      >What's the rate for getting mesothelioma after working with asbestos? That's a bad comparison. You don't just get a little bit of cancer. You get it or you don't and when it gets caught is what matters. Cognitive decline is not binary like that. With asbestos it depends on how much exposure, how often and how long. PPE for use with high temperatures used to be asbestos before that was a liability. You don't see "served in an artillery unit in 'nam" on the TV commercials for the lawyers who litigate that stuff because only occasionally wearing asbestos gloves as part of your day job for a few years isn't a big deal. The same goes for doing brake jobs on your own vehicles since the '60s. It's not enough exposure. The advice for people who find it in their houses is to make sure it's not getting disturbed. Low levels of exposure = low risk. Sure, you can come up with an average decrease in life expectancy per some amount of exposure (this is popular with cigarettes) but it's not very meaningful when the result of the exposure to asbestos is a coin toss with worse odds years down the line. Regardless, I'd take a slow death from age 45 to 65 if it meant that my family shot to the top of the economic ladder over the course of my career. Unless you really, really screw up wealth doesn't go away between generations.
    • mustacheemperor 9y ago
      With that percentage - which is considered the unlikely minimum - there is at least one player developing CTE on the field for every team in the league right now.
  • matwood 9y ago
    > Playing football is almost certainly bad for your brain It's bad for you in general. I used to go a gym with some ex-NFL guys, and they literally could barely move most days. All of them told me they would never let their kids play football. Every single one had life long lasting ailments, and none of them were the guys who made millions.
    • Retric 9y ago
      Minimum salary is $450,000$ / year and average career is 2.66 years. So most people are making at least 1 million today. https://www.si.com/nfl/2016/03/01/nfl-careers-shortened-two-years-data-analysis https://www.si.com/nfl/2016/03/01/nfl-careers-shortened-two-... The problem is not so much the NFL IMO, it's the 4 years of collage + 1-4 years of high school before that. Means most people get hurt without any real benefit.
      • vacri 9y ago
        Minimum salary increased relatively recently. About a decade ago you could find NFL benchwarmers on not much more than 50k.
        • somecontext 9y ago
          For some context, it appears that the minimum salary in 2007 was $275k/year nominally ($325k/year inflation-adjusted) for rookies, increasing by $75k/year each year until the fifth. My research suggests that the minimum salary first hit $50k/year nominally in 1988 (which is $100k/year inflation-adjusted). The minimum salary has always been at least $60k/year inflation-adjusted since the first collective bargaining agreement in 1968.
          • vacri 9y ago
            Hrm. I remember looking up the minimum salaries about a decade or so ago and was surprised to see that they were so low. Maybe my source was out of date.
    • 9y ago
  • warcher 9y ago
    They didn't say that. Here's the quote I believe you skimmed and misinterpreted. "About 1,300 former players have died since the B.U. group began examining brains. So even if every one of the other 1,200 players had tested negative — which even the heartiest skeptics would agree could not possibly be the case — the minimum C.T.E. prevalence would be close to 9 percent, vastly higher than in the general population." They're being honest about the selection bias, but they're saying the absolute minimum threshold is 9%. That's high number one, and it's almost certainly much higher than nine percent because they only tested a few of the brains. 1300 is every former pro player that died. Not every one they tested.
    • ggreer 9y ago
      As I said before, that's in the 10th paragraph of the article. The first line people read is: > A neuropathologist has examined the brains of 111 N.F.L. players — and 110 were found to have C.T.E. It's incredibly disingenuous to lead with that. It makes readers think that the rate of CTE is almost 100%. Readers have to get through nine more paragraphs (including profiles of two NFL players) before the truth shows up. Yes, NFL players have absurdly high rates of CTE compared to the general population. Nobody in this thread is saying otherwise. But disingenuity makes your side easier to dismiss and discredit, even if it's right. That's why I criticized the article.
      • warcher 9y ago
        110/111 testing positive for CTE is insanely high, even with selection bias. This is a big, big deal, and should be treated like a big, big deal. This is not hyperbolic in the slightest. If a chemical plant was suspected of causing cancer, and you got those test results, same experimental bias and all, it would be shut down instantly. Boyoga!
        • BayesStreet 9y ago
          If I picked a sample of 5 cherries and I made sure they were all rotten, it sort of reduces the amount of statistical inference you can do about the true distribution of the cherries to zero. Your use of "even with selection bias" doesn't really make sense here.
• danso 9y ago
  There's always been the possibility of selection bias in finding CTE in football players' brains. Many of the brains are studied at the request of the family of the deceased player, presumably because they had noticed symptoms of mental degeneration. And there are cases where the player themselves requested the scans in their will. Junior Seau didn't leave behind a suicide note, but he did kill himself in a way that left his brain physically intact. The NYT piece notes that even if none of the other ~1,300 NFL players (who have since died since this research began) have brains affected by CTE, "the minimum C.T.E. prevalence would be close to 9 percent, vastly higher than in the general population.".
  • rory096 9y ago
    Isn't that still selection bias? Presumably CTE sufferers have a higher risk of dying — their healthy peers may still be alive and thus not included in that 1,300.
    • FanaHOVA 9y ago
      The NFL isn't a 10 years old league, there's plenty of players who passed away. If anything there would be more examples since equipment was worse before and there were less rules that protected players, especially top/crown helmet leading tackles which started getting penalized with 15yd only in 2013.
      • hervature 9y ago
        I think the prevalence of concussions in football compared to rugby is proof that "better equipment" doesn't prevent concussions. It has the paradoxical effect of causing them. Better shoulder pads allow for people to launch their bodies without fear of separating their shoulders. Conversely, helmets are not designed to protect the brain, only to prevent skull fractures. Thus, I don't think your argument holds water.
        • danso 9y ago
          Similar to how boxing gloves don't protect the punched as much as it allows the puncher to go full throttle without fear of breaking their hands: https://www.economist.com/news/international/21639765-bare-knuckle-fights-would-break-more-hands-fewer-heads-hang-up-boxing-gloves https://www.economist.com/news/international/21639765-bare-k...
• deleted 9y ago
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• pavement 9y ago
  Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy in American football has been getting lots of media attention over the past few years, and the counterpoints to whether or not this is a serious issue will rely mostly on emphasizing the survivorship bias of those who enjoyed a high quality of life despite possibly (or assuredly) suffering such injuries, but in many ways almost all athletic sports represent feats of corporeal risk to the player, and I don't think the face of the game, or its popularity will change very much. In many sports, people face death itself, and pay the ultimate price for competing. CTE, while made plain by studies such as this, might only change youth and amateur level competition. Professional leagues will probably continue apace, even amid full disclosure of well-known hazards. This particular hazard wasn't previously well understod, but now it is, so, like boxing, it's still an improvement to the sport, to have players enter competition properly informed of the risks they are undertaking, so that they understand the choice they are making when they decide to play this game. tl;dr The point of any given sport is usually to step into harms way, on some level, in a controlled arena and to test your abilities against other people in a contest of skill and endurance. That's how this works.
  • jordache 9y ago
    >might only change youth and amateur level competition. Professional leagues will probably continue apace, even amid full disclosure of well-known hazards. You don't see a direction link between the grassroots levels to the pro level? If you kill the interest, or participation at the grassroots level, there will never be a compelling pro league to source from. Good riddance to a lame game of consisting of mostly low skilled athletes
    • CoffeeDregs 9y ago
      Football is only 5th on this list of dangerous sports: https://www.thetoptens.com/most-dangerous-sports/ https://www.thetoptens.com/most-dangerous-sports/ The real issue is that football trauma has effects over longer time periods and the long term effects are discounted in the near term. >Good riddance to a lame game of consisting of mostly low skilled athletes Having played up to college, it's tremendous fun and has roles for a range skillsets. While not necessarily very intelligent, everyone is very skilled.
• artursapek 9y ago
  I think people take for granted now how good the Times is at these interactive, zine-like layouts for their feature articles. I just want to say another job well done on this one. Each one of these I see is a work of art that clearly took a lot of time across the team.
  • ovrdrv3 9y ago
    You can tell there are many devs and designers on their team that take pride in their work! Have you seen those articles that say, "guess what the rate is for X over the years", and you fill out the graph with your mouse, and once you are done you can see what the actual data looks like? It's refreshing
    • wcarron 9y ago
      IIRC, they are some the main contributors to D3.js
      • waterfowl 9y ago
        bostock worked there, so that would make sense.
  • kentt 9y ago
    I guess to each their own. I found it unnecessarily difficult to read the grey text on black background. It always seems strange to only use a 30% of a monitor for the main content and fill the rest with pictures.
  • david-cako 9y ago
    Yeah, at one point I stumbled upon the portfolio of a dev who does their interactive content and loved it. I have so much appreciation for people who have a good sense for design that is intuitive/effortless for the user. Especially in this case, when it means cutting the learning curve that a user experiences when they are presented with a bunch of new data.
  • ilaksh 9y ago
• mikeh1010 9y ago
  I want to push back on the "every sport is dangerous" argument I'm seeing in here. There's a difference between "you might die right in the middle of this very fun activity" and "you might die slowly and horribly years from now when you're retired and in the midst of raising a family." I ski pretty aggressively, and of course I might die doing that. But every day I go home and know, "well it wasn't today! Today was just great clean fun." If I had a nagging thought of "but today might give me a mental disorder in 20 years" then I'd be much less inclined to participate in the sport.
  • saulrh 9y ago
    It's even worse when it's "you will die slowly and horribly years from now", which is what football is starting to look like. There's no "risk"; you're just storing up your consequences for later.
    • Touche 9y ago
      Hm, is it true that everyone with CTE dies "horribly"? I think that might be overstating things a bit.
      • chasing 9y ago
        Not every single person with CTE dies horribly. As I understand it, some simply live decades happily forgetting their children's names and what day of the week it is.
        • Touche 9y ago
          Is that really best-case scenario? So you're saying that among the retired football players who do TV today, Terry Bradshaw, Howie Long, Michael Strahan, Cris Collinsworth, etc. 90% of these players have CTE and will have decades-long dementia? So for the older players we should start seeing that very soon, no?
          • chvrn 9y ago
• beebmam 9y ago
  My dad played both college and professional football. He had early signs of dementia 15 years ago, but it became really bad about 10 years ago. After a long struggle, he died just earlier this year. It's hard to deal with
  • thomyorkie 9y ago
    How old was he when the early signs began?
  • kendallpark 9y ago
    It was just this past week that was reading up on Alzheimer's and texted my brothers (all of us played football) that I'm glad we all stopped when we did. I think there are twenty-six cumulative football-years between us, all on the line too. That being said, football is football. After seven seasons I knew my IQ had dropped some points. But if I could go back in time, I'd do it all over again. What I would give for just one more play. When people say football will eventually become this archaic sport because of the risks, I just laugh. Head injury concerns are the single reason I am not playing right now. I've had a good run, but it's important to know when to stop and prioritize the latter half of your life.
• et2o 9y ago
  The prevalence of CTE in the NFL brains is irrelevant until we can compare it to the prevalence in the general population. And the issue is it's being more closely examined in the NFL brains currently. General population prevalence estimates are likely underestimated.
  • chasing 9y ago
    From the article: "So even if every one of the other 1,200 players would have tested negative — which even the heartiest skeptics would agree could not possibly be the case — the minimum C.T.E. prevalence would be close to 9 percent, vastly higher than in the general population." Where are you getting your information that estimates of CTE in the general population are low?
    • et2o 9y ago
      CTE is a post-mortem phenotype. Dementia related to degenerative brain disease is common but not often measured (autopsies aren't done very often for senile patients with an obvious cause of death, especially for autopsies that disfigure the skull). The idea that <9% of the general population at death have degenerative brain disease is highly implausible. Especially since we know AD has a prevalence which is multiples of 9%. Of course, I am not claiming CTE is not a problem in contact sports; merely that this headline is ridiculous. It's more important to estimate an odds ratio and confidence interval for the point estimate. My back of the envelope estimate for the OR would be ~3 (still concerning and large!). There are related common problems in my field of biomedical research. I am a published author in Alzheimer disease, although it is no longer my primary focus. :)
      • richardwhiuk 9y ago
        "The idea that <9% of the general population at death have degenerative brain disease is highly implausible. " If you consider dementia explicitly, than the epidemiology suggests a potential rate as high as 20-40% - which is much higher than the lowest possible CTE rate. (In fact, it's possible that all CTEs diagnosed in this report would be classified as purely dementia in the general population).
• autokad 9y ago
  i wish they would outlaw head slapping, from teammates. when i played hs football, after every play, players would slap teammates on the head (usually the back) to show support - i hated it. i also think players are too big today, more weight at higher velocities only makes things worse for the head. the only reasonable thing I can think of is a 'salary cap' based on player weight as well.
• jonbarker 9y ago
  I'm more interested in what happens to the brain with youth soccer. Bigger problem than a couple hundred pro athletes.
  • awinder 9y ago
    This article may be about nfl players but concussions in youth football is also a huge problem. It’s been linked to declines in learning aptitude, among other things, so as you start expanding this issue to a problem of diminished quality of life you get an even crazier picture.
  • bhouston 9y ago
    I agree. Heading soccer balls is proven to at least temporarily reduce IQ. I've never let my kids play that sport. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2016/10/25/heading-a-soccer-ball-causes-instant-brain-changes-study-finds/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2016/1... http://www.cnn.com/2017/02/01/health/soccer-headers-concussion-study/index.html http://www.cnn.com/2017/02/01/health/soccer-headers-concussi...
    • nugget 9y ago
      So what are the safer competitive team sports for kids to participate in?
      • logfromblammo 9y ago
        Ironically, thanks to the potentially lethal weaponry used as equipment, archery and target shooting. Swimming is also relatively safe. Distance running might result in repetitive stress injury, but it won't kill you. Slow-pitch softball eliminates most of the risks from baseball. Hit by pitch and RSI from pitching are the dangers there. Cycling removes some of the RSI risk from distance running, but replaces it with higher-speed impacts, usually into hard surfaces. Edit: It depends on your definition of "team sport", really. If you define it such that you can't meaningfully separate out any individual performances, you're cutting out all relay-type competitions from the start. If you say archery is not a team sport, then neither is a swimming relay race. Where do you draw the line? What's the minimum number of participants that have to work together to qualify as a team?
• Ethereum 9y ago
  Do we have any idea what the baseline incidence of CTE, using the same criteria used in this study, might be in the general population?
  • jessriedel 9y ago
    Apparently not. The criteria for what counts as evidence of CTE is still being fleshed out, at least as of 3 years ago. > The neuropathology of CTE is increasingly well defined. In 2013, McKee and colleagues published the largest case report to date of individuals with neuropathologically confirmed CTE, presenting proposed criteria for four stages of CTE pathology based on the severity of the findings [9••]. Formal validation of the reliability of these criteria and the staging system are currently being performed by a team of nine neuropathologists, funded by a National Institutes of Health (NIH) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4255271/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4255271/
• Ethereum 9y ago
  Do we have any idea what the baseline incidence of CTE, using the same criteria used in this study, might be in the general population?
• Annoying 9y ago
  This is what bothers me. We all know football is terrible for your brain. But the NFL thinks if they acknowledge it we won't be fans anymore. Which isn't the case at all. I would have more respect for the Shield if they said we know its terrible and we're doing everything in our power to make it safer. With new tackling techniques at lower levels to better equipment.
• hamburglar1 9y ago
  the 110/111 stat is incredibly misleading. The article even says that "many families have donated brains specifically because the former player showed symptoms of C.T.E.". Its unfortunate that the NYTimes sentimentalizes like this. I think it's pretty clear that football causes C.T.E but the title and lead 110/111 statistic is dangerously disingenuous.
• jessriedel 9y ago
  So the punter had CTE too? And all the quarterbacks? Obviously these players can get concussions, but don't we expect them to have a much lower rate of repeated, sub-concussive impacts that are supposed to result in CTE? (They don't say so, but 110 of 111 were diagnosed, and if the only brain tested without it was the punter I can't imagine them not emphasizing that. I don't think this conflicts with the family's request to not identify the player.) Presumably there is some sort of way to quantify the extent of disease besides yes/no. I'd really like to see the the extent vs. player position. Is there a write up for this, or was it a direct to NY Times deal? Look, football is a violent sport, and it's certainly plausible that this induces a chronic, difficult-to-detect but serious disease over years of playing, and that the organization making billions from it would fight against that conclusion. But it's hard to square the smugness and outrage in this thread with the observation that NFL players have a lower rate of all-cause mortality than the general population. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/09/sports/football/nfl-players-live-longer-than-men-in-general-population-study-says.html http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/09/sports/football/nfl-player... Obviously that's consistent with the NFL having a significant net-negative impact on the health of athletes, who are a special sub-population that is likely to be of above-average health. (Although note that the average body weight of their pool is also very high, which would almost assuredly still be true even if they hadn't played, and that increases baseline death rates from things like heart disease.) And that impact could be so negative as to outweigh the benefits of playing, possibly necessitating rule changes, compensation, etc. But there is no ghastly epidemic of NFL players dying by the droves. I don't think there's been a neurological performance test of retired players, but one will probably be done and I'm willing to bet that NFL players again do better than the general population (which, again, does not mean that playing in the NFL doesn't make you dumber). Anyone want to bet against me?
  • jessriedel 9y ago
    Ahh, found the actual paper: http://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2645104 http://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2645104 Incredibly, they list the number of each position type who have mild and severe CTE (their only degree of gradation) but apparently don't list the total number of players at each position, and hence I can't tell how many brains didn't have CTE by position. Nonetheless, we can confirm that both the punter and placekicker were diagnosed with mild CTE (a placekicker!) and the severe:mild ratio was higher among quarterbacks than lineman (11:2 for QBs vs. 29:8 and 27:8 for offensive and defensive linemen respectively).
• pcl 9y ago
  I don't really know what a normal brain looks like. A sidebar (middlebar?) about halfway through the article describes what we're looking at: The trauma of repetitive blows to the head triggers degeneration in brain tissue, including the buildup of an abnormal protein called tau. Thin slices of tissue are dyed and the tau shows up as these darker areas.
  • waynecochran 9y ago
    Yes. The site needs to show a normal brain. I don't have anything to compare to. Really bad omission.
• hyperion2010 9y ago
  This study was made possible because of autopsies. If autopsies were standard practice in the US this would have been discovered years, if not decades ago.
  • djohnston 9y ago
    Even if autopsies were standard practice for all Americans you wouldn't see docs running tau-staining tests on every cadaver they received.
• thomyorkie 9y ago
  As someone who played 3 years of football in middle school and 3 years in high school and sustained 2 concussions along with tons of sub-concussive hits, I just hope that by there will be a cure for CTE sometime in the next few decades. Crossing my fingers for Johnson's Kernel or Musk's neural lace to succeed.
• ZooAgent 9y ago
  Well that's a big surprise. But the NFL is a gigantic cult, people are not going to boycott it just to improve the well being of the gods players.
• socrates1998 9y ago
  The bodies were all donated with the vast majority of them having symptoms of CTE while they were alive. Essentially, it's not even close to a representative sample of former NFL players. It would be the same as people who had knee problems, then were found to have arthritis in their knees after an autopsy. I would be very careful to say that all (or almost all) NFL players will have CTE when they finish football. I have seen more research on people's brains where they categorize them in two types, ones that recover from brain trauma and others that don't. For me, that seems more likely. If you are an NFL player with the type of brain that recovers well, you probably will be fine later in life. If you have a brain that just doesn't seem to do well with that, then you could develop CTE. That would be my guess.
• alistproducer2 9y ago
  Historians will look back at American Football as our analog to the Roman's gladiatorial games. A lot of people don't realize that during the Imperial era of Rome fights to the death had become uncommon.[0] The games were watched in an arena and primarily sold hard-hitting violence between members of the lower castes of society and sometimes people got killed or horribly maimed....sound familiar? I stopped watching American football last year once I could no longer consciously watch men destroy themselves for money and the amusement of a country that largely despises/fears them in any other setting. 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gladiator#Victory_and_defeat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gladiator#Victory_and_defeat
  • dsfyu404ed 9y ago
    There's a big difference between cheering on people killing each other and a popular sport remaining popular after the long term consequences became known.
    • vkou 9y ago
      Most of the time, they didn't kill eachother.
    • alistproducer2 9y ago
      I don't feel like you read my comment before posting.....
  • kendallpark 9y ago
    Honestly (as a former football player) I find this opinion to reek of pseudo-academic snobbery. You know why football is such a popular sport? Because people love football. More importantly, people love playing football. I understand that not everyone sees the appeal of the sport and it's their right to have their own preferences. But to simply dismiss the passionate pursuits of hundreds of thousands of players across the globe as some engineered gladiator battle by the upper class is absurd. There was football before there was television. If the NFL shut down tomorrow and televised broadcasts were banned, there would still be football. You can condemn the exploitation of players' health in the NFL without creating these gross overgeneralizations of the sport. Moreover I think it's offensive to imply football is this caste regime as if the rich people are watching the poor people play. Football pervades all income levels. Your rich prep high schools still have a football team. Ivy league schools still have football teams. If anything it is an equalizer because your rich suburban prep school guy lines up next to a dude that grew up in the inner city all the same. And their standing in the team, along with compensation, will be dependent on their performance as opposed to race or economic background. Where else in society is there this level of parity?
• drtillberg 9y ago
  The JAMA data tables [1] also covered military service, with a high incidence of CTE there (5 mild, 45 severe). Both of the kicker/punters in the study also had mild CTE (did they kick with their heads?). Really leads to wonder about the prevalence in the general population, for sport and laborers at large, in addition to football players. The average years of play was 15.1, which is a really long time to play the sport. The authors are playing to a theme here, rather than objectively reporting results. [1] http://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2645104 http://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2645104
• dnautics 9y ago
  Is no one curious about the one brain that didn't get CTE? there could be some insight into how to prevent Alzheimer's for example, since oxidative inflammatory responses are invoked in both conditions as a possible mechanism.
• aezell 9y ago
  (N of 1 anecdote warning) I started playing football at 6 years old. Tackle football came about two years later. In my junior year of high school, my back problems and knee problems were so bad, I had to quit. It was the best day of my life. In recent years, I've become an ultrarunner and am generally very healthy. I'm 41 now and about 5 years ago, I passed out after cutting my hand (vagal response to the sight of my blood) and suffered a 10 minute long seizure after passing out. So, I spent the next few days doing EEGs and MRIs on my noggin. There was nothing definite but the neurologist noticed some lesions on my brain in various places. First thing he asks me, "Did you play football as a child?" I said yes, and he said, "You should have an MRI at least every 5 years to see if these things get any bigger." Recently, my memory has gotten worse. I've found myself rocking or nodding my head for no discernible reason. Control over my lower legs is variable. As a runner, I'm fairly in tune with my body. I can tell that things are not going as they should. Who knows if I'll get CTE (or some other neurological problem) and if I do, if it's related to the 10 years of football I played. What I do know is that this experience is not one I'd want my children to have when it's most decidedly not necessary. All that to say that there might be a LOT of people like me in the US who never even got close to college football or the NFL that could potentially suffer this same fate.
  • LeifCarrotson 9y ago
    Has helmet technology improved in the last 25 years? It will be a few years before my son could play tackle football (and I would probably try to gently steer him towards real football), but the helmets I see at sporting goods stores today look pretty much indiscernible from that which I wore for one fall season in the early 2000s.
    • maaaats 9y ago
      "better helmets" only mean you take bigger internal hits.
    • kendallpark 9y ago
      Helmet technology has improved but not at the rate that humans have improved weightlifting/training. You've got bigger people running faster into collisions (and as we all know, momentum = mass * velocity).
• aezell 9y ago
  If we really want to determine how dangerous or unhealthy football is, we should consider the full picture. As part of this thought exercise, let's take as a given that CTE doesn't exist and brain injuries are unimportant. After that, let's look at the prevalence of diabetes, heart disease, and other long-term degenerative diseases in the NFL player population. Then, let's look at the shortened earning potential of the NFL player. Yes, for a year, maybe more, they are highly paid but lifetime earnings might not be what you'd expect. How do the stresses of many men who leave the NFL with no skills and often an abandoned college degree affect them and their families? Next, let's consider the lifestyle the NFL envisions for its fans. Spending at least a full day each week sitting and eating unhealthy food while consuming alcohol. Spend the rest of the week gambling on the outcomes of the games (or individual players). Much of the time, this fandom is done as a family leading to impacts on children in the home. There's a societal health impact here. The list goes on if we follow this thinking. So, if we go back and remove our given, we end up with a spectacle that unduly endangers its participants, encourages unhealthy behavior in its fans, and indoctrinates our youth to be accepting of all the above. Meanwhile, a very few wealthy families get even wealthier on the backs of all that.
  • 2bitencryption 9y ago
    I agree with your early points, but I don't think we need to take the typical Hacker News stance of "everything is killing everybody and people need to start behaving more like me and less like themselves." > Next, let's consider the lifestyle the NFL envisions for its fans. Spending at least a full day each week sitting and eating unhealthy food while consuming alcohol. Spend the rest of the week gambling on the outcomes of the games (or individual players). Much of the time, this fandom is done as a family leading to impacts on children in the home. There's a societal health impact here. Won't somebody please think of the children! They might grow up to watch FOOTBALL!!
    • aezell 9y ago
      That wasn't my stance. My stance was one of examining the full societal cost of any activity. Football is certainly not alone in the impacts it has on families. It's just the one we are talking about in this forum. But, if one is seriously trying to determine sociological trends, these are the kinds of questions one must examine. It might be a similar line of thought, with different details, for the increased use of digital devices in our society. Lastly, you're being facetious but their watching football might well be part of the problem. Without participants or an audience, the NFL ceases to exist thereby removing the negatives AND positives that its existence might create.
• deleted 9y ago
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• m3kw9 9y ago
  Head gets hit repeatedly. That's the most complex and delecate organ in your body. I don't know live appendages that can take hits repeatedly without any long term side effects. Money talks in the NFL, so as long as that gets passed around, they are not taming it down unless the govt steps in
• andrewsyc 9y ago
  As much as I love boxing and other sports, they are terrible for one's brain. The worst thing one can do is cause any damage to your brain as that dramatically effects quality of life.