A recent study asked former NFL football players if they believed they were suffering from chronic traumatic encephalopathy, often known as CTE. This is a degenerative brain disease that happens due to the cumulative effect of sustaining numerous concussions.
In the study, roughly 33% of the players surveyed said that they believed they had CTE. A total of 1,980 people responded to the survey, and 681 made this claim. Additionally, 176 of them said they had been diagnosed with dementia, such as Alzheimer’s disease. On top of that, over 230 reported having suicidal thoughts, which are sometimes connected to CTE and this specific type of brain damage.
Why they are likely right
One of the issues with CTE is that it can only be diagnosed accurately by examining a person’s brain after they have passed away. So it is impossible to determine definitively if the players in the above study actually have CTE.
However, 376 players have been examined postmortem, and researchers discovered CTE in 345 of those cases. That is a rate of 91.76%. In the vast majority of cases where CTE is suspected, that’s exactly what researchers find. This doesn’t mean it will apply to all players in the study, but their rate of self-reporting is vastly lower than the rate at which researchers actually find CTE. It’s likely that many of the players in the study who claimed they didn’t believe they had CTE were actually wrong.
It’s also not just the NFL that is an issue. Anyone who has suffered repeated concussions is at risk and needs to know exactly what legal options they have.