91–100 of 206 posts
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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?
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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...
Bit extreme of a reaction to two severely flawed click-bait studies and relevant to that "fear as a product" article from yesterday. Washington Post: 14 men participating in the study. Each was asked to perform a rotational header — redirecting the soccer ball — 20 consecutive times during 10-minute sessions. tiny sample size + 20 consecutive headers in 10 minutes is astronomically rare occurrence in soccer, 3 header…
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…
Today's youth and amateur level competitors are tomorrow's professionals. I think there's a decent chance that in 50 years, American football will no longer be America's dominant sport simply because the player base may dry up. And I'm okay with that. I think it's telling when former NFL players discourage their own kids from playing football.
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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.
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 (…
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Football is only 5th on this list of 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 necessari…
Is there any data behind that clickbait link?
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…
But you have absolutely no idea if aggressive skiing is giving you CTE because no one has ever looked to investigate it. 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…
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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?
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 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 focu…
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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.
This is currently happening to my grandfather. He played football most of his life and up through adulthood for the Philadelphia Eagles before leaving the sport to pursue his passion for flying (eventually becoming a captain for Delta). He's had a charmed life. Lots of great experiences, like a real-life Tom Sawyer or Huck Finn, and the stories to go along with them. Now's he battling (and losing) with the late-stage…
The point being, from what I've seen on the subject, there's no way to diagnose CTE until the patient has passed away and you can slice open their brain. It's possible that your grandfather's symptoms are related to his concussions, but it's also very possible that it would have happened anyways. CTE usually manifests 8-10 years after these brain injuries and has a lot of symptoms beyond the dementia you list, so it could be garden-variety Alzheimers.
Regardless, you have my sympathies. Alzheimers-type dementia is truly a terrible way to lose a loved one. The anti-climactic nature of it makes it really difficult to get closure in the way that you do when someone's death is more abrupt. Instead, they slowly fade away in the "boiled frog" fashion and you're left at whatever funeral you end up having realizing that they died a long time before their body expired and you never got to grieve. Be sure that you're intentional in remembering the person he used to be and don't let the empty shell of a person that exists now replace that in your memory. I didn't do that enough and it made grieving for my grandmother very difficult.
If there's a silver lining to my story, my mother is now past the age when her mother was diagnosed with Alzheimers and is, thus far, not showing signs of the disease. Given some of the research that's tying Alzheimers to particulate air pollution, I'm hopeful that the strides made by the EPA and others in reducing our air pollution will mean that she won't have to go through that ordeal and I won't have to lose her the way I lost my grandmother. If your dad is more than a decade past his football-playing days and symptoms haven't shown up, there's a good chance that he won't either.
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It will? As long as there are poor people with some athletic ability and fans willing to watch them, there will be grid iron football players.
Sure but boxing gives us a historical precedent. Boxing used to be the professional sport. It was also a sport that many youth across all spectrums of society participated in. Today it is confined to a niche professionally and is almost totally absent from most youth sport systems.
I know MMA fans might take exception but I think I'd lump them in with boxing fans of the past. Maybe there is some clear delimiter between MMA fans and boxing fan of the past; I can't think what it would be though.
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But you have absolutely no idea if aggressive skiing is giving you CTE because no one has ever looked to investigate it. 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…
I don't know about GP, but I'm an aggressive skier and very, very rarely hit my head. I have maybe a dozen falls a season, wear a helmet and am not colliding with anything. This is a silly comparison.