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110 N.F.L. Brains

nytimes.com

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Re: 110 N.F.L. Brains

#71

Post by logfromblammo »

chasing wrote: post #25
Touche wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hm, is it true that everyone with CTE dies "horribly"? I think that might be overstating things a bit.

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.

In my opinion, the most horrible death is the one where someone else starts living in your body, and no one is even aware that you have gone.

Senile dementia, Alzheimers, brain cancers, and TBI frighten me even more than being flung 100m across the pavement in an automobile accident, or getting dragged into the gap by a commuter train. With those, you know you're dead, and so does everyone else. When you slowly lose your mind, no one can ever really be sure when you stopped being you, not even yourself.

Re: 110 N.F.L. Brains

#72

Post by nerfhammer »

Touche wrote: post #65
chasing wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm being a little tongue-in-cheek, of course. The article implies a selection bias -- that the actual number of football players with CTE could be as low as 9%. It also notes cases where CTE effects really become "horrible" much later in life, for men who are older than the guys you list. Guys who self-select to be television personalities also might have a lower incidence of CTE. There's also a chance that some odd…

Thanks for the reply. This is what I'm trying to understand myself. I didn't see the 9% number in the article. I did see the mention about selection bias. So I wonder what the true numbers are here. If it's 9% then that explains well enough why so many ex-players don't show strong signs of CTE (by strong I mean long-term memory loss or worse).

The 9% is assuming that 100% of unknown cases are in fact negative.

This study showed that 110 of 111 players tested had CTE. But many of their families consented because they suspected CTE already, so it's not a random sample and therefore you can't generalize that to the rest of the population. 110 is 9% of the population of 1300 deceased players for the given time period. CTE is normally extremely rare.

Re: 110 N.F.L. Brains

#73

Post by ouid »

criddell wrote: post #52
mikeh1010 wrote: post #12

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 j…

> "well it wasn't today! Today was just great clean fun." Good clean fun that has erased quite a bit of usable life from your knees. Better than a brain injury, but not great.

>better than a brain injury, but not great.

brain injuries and knee injuries are not really comparable.

Re: 110 N.F.L. Brains

#74

Post by logfromblammo »

nugget wrote: post #57
bhouston wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/2016/1... http://www.cnn.com/2017/02/01/health/soccer-headers-concussi...

So what are the safer competitive team sports for kids to participate in?

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?

Re: 110 N.F.L. Brains

#75

Post by hughes »

saulrh wrote: post #14
mikeh1010 wrote: post #12

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 j…

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.

Well, at least of nearly all the dead NFL players whose families suspected they had CTE, they did. As noted in the article, "there’s a tremendous selection bias".

Re: 110 N.F.L. Brains

#77

Post by thomyorkie »

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.

Re: 110 N.F.L. Brains

#78

Post by ouid »

logfromblammo wrote: post #74
nugget wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what are the safer competitive team sports for kids to participate in?

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…

not really team sports though.

Re: 110 N.F.L. Brains

#79

Post by [deleted] »

saulrh wrote: post #40
ggreer wrote: post #37

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 sympt…

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?

[deleted]

Re: 110 N.F.L. Brains

#80

Post by ouid »

nugget wrote: post #57
bhouston wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/2016/1... http://www.cnn.com/2017/02/01/health/soccer-headers-concussi...

So what are the safer competitive team sports for kids to participate in?

I don't think basketball comes with a lot of TBI, and baseball is pretty safe if you don't get hit in the head by pitches. That's 2 out of big 3 in America.
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