Cte Football Quotes

Boston University’s CTE Center has established a “brain bank,” where former athletes with symptoms consistent with CTE can donate their brains upon death. Now with 425 brains, the center published a study in 2017 of former professional and amateur football players. Among 111 NFL players, the brains of all but one of them showed signs of severe CTE.

Multiple blows to the head, whether in football, soccer, boxing, hockey, or other activity, can sometimes cause permanent brain damage accompanied by changes in personality, memory, and thinking. Chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, is the medical term for the damage caused by these repeated concussions. Standard MRIs cannot detect it, so a diagnosis of CTE usually cannot be made with certainty until after a person has died. Only on autopsy can a pathologist see the damaged brain tissue.

Boston University’s CTE Center has established a “brain bank,” where former athletes with symptoms consistent with CTE can donate their brains upon death. Now with 425 brains, the center published a study in 2017 of former professional and amateur football players. Among 111 NFL players, the brains of all but one of them showed signs of severe CTE. That’s sobering and frightening, but it’s extremely important to keep in mind that this study involved former players who already showed personality and mental changes consistent with brain injury. It was not a random sample of NFL players, most of whom never show such changes despite having experienced concussions.