8 ms·

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 muc

• 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.
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• 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.