Do you have any links to these studies? I'm not trying to be a smart**s, I genuinely would like to know what the research says. All I hear in the media are the sad stories and other anecdotal evidence. I would like some more comprehensive information? I'm still holding my breath for ESPN or other media to provide that information. I'm starting to turn blue!!!
Some questions I'd like to ask. Can we prove that CTE is linked to football are other instances of repeated head trauma? Or is it possible there is some other cause? What are the estimated percentage of football players that have CTE? For NFL Players? College Players? High School Players? How does that compare to the estimated percentage of non-football players with CTE. What are the %s for other sports.
I fear that there maybe a link between football and CTE. However, as a father, I try to make decisions for my kids based not on fear/anxiety but on facts and logic. If you make decisions based on fear/anxiety, then you end up like the mother at a Super Bowl party I attended that was explaining to the group why she makes her 9 year old son go into the women's bathroom with her at Target. Fear/emotion can make us all do strange things. I would like the comprehensive facts. And if football is unsafe for my boys... so be it.
So really, my point was this: CTE is pretty obvious in a cadaver. With the sheer number of autopsies conducted, cadavers dissected by medical schools, brains donated to science, etc... it's pretty clear that we would see CTE when it occurs. And it does. People with repeated brain trauma have exhibited it (see lots of stories about boxers, it's where the term "punch drunk" comes from:
http://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=260461). But that kind of repeated trauma just isn't seen in normal everyday life. So no, I can't point to any particular studies of non-football players. My point is that, prior to paying attention to it in football and other sports, this was pretty much thought to be a disease boxers got, and nobody else. It is, in fact, this absence of CTE in people who did not play professional or semi-professional sports that is the evidence for football (and other sports, like boxing, rugby, soccer, hockey) being very highly correlated with CTE. The problem is that you can't diagnose CTE in a living person yet, and possibly ever.
The important thing to note here is that there IS a link between playing football and CTE. No, simply strapping on a helmet does not mean you will get CTE. But every time you put on that helmet, every time you get your bell rung, crash helmets, take a hard hit, or your head bounces into the ground (even with a helmet on), your brain collides with your skull. The more times your brain collides with your skull, the more likely you are to develop CTE. Think of it like lung cancer. Smoking one cigarette is not going to cause you to develop lung cancer. But the more you smoke, the more likely you are to get lung cancer. The more you play football or hockey or rugby or box the more likely you are to develop CTE. There is no magic counter, no strict number of "hard hits" that you take that determines with any certainty that you will or won't get CTE.
I know that it's wikipedia, but their CTE wiki is actually pretty well done and very well documented and cited:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronic_traumatic_encephalopathy
