110 N.F.L. Brains

(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-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?

In my experience it makes my head a larger target than I'm used to, plus it affects my peripheral vision, making me take more shots to the head than I would have otherwise.

Plus, put on some headgear, let me punch you, and tell me how cushioned you felt.

Today it is confined to a niche professionally and is almost totally absent from most youth sport systems.

In football, as in boxing, the original investigation began because head trauma is obvious, but as the study broadened some of the worst cases of CTE were actually offensive linesmen. These are generally not the players who dish or receive hard hits, and many had never had a suspected concussion in their career. That led to the dominant theory that it isn't concussions -- the big hits -- that are the main cause of CTE, but instead many small traumas (in that case the o-line engaging with the d-line) that add up to CTE.

There is every reason to suspect that many other sports yield these sorts of recurring sub trauma, and aggressive skiing seems a probable candidate [edit - note that it does not require that you hit your head, have an accident, etc. If enough of a high-G event is transmitted to the brain, that can be a subconcussion]. It just isn't terribly common to do an intensive brain study of people after death to find these correlations.

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.