Brain Trauma Investigator

I’ve studied neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s for decades. These are diseases that gradually attack the nervous system, including the brain. About 10 years ago, I was giving a talk on brain disease and an audience member told me they knew someone who wanted to meet me. It turned out to be Chris Nowinski, a retired WWE wrestler. Nowinski suspected that repeated hits he took in the ring had impaired his brain function. He’d started a foundation to study the long-term effects of concussions—brain injuries caused by blows to the head. After speaking with him, I wanted to study CTE.

Our team examined 111 brains from deceased former National Football League (NFL) players. We discovered that 110 of them had CTE. We also looked at 53 brains from college football players who gave up the sport after they graduated—48 of them had CTE. And we checked 14 brains from people who played football only through high school—three of those had CTE.

The brains in the study were mainly donated by family members who were concerned about whether football had affected their loved ones’ brains, so they may not reflect all football players. But our results do show that CTE is associated with playing tackle football early in life, not just at the professional level.

You can’t accurately diagnose CTE during life. CTE leads to problems while people are alive, like changes in mood and problems with thinking. So you can make a well-educated guess that they’re suffering from CTE based on symptoms, but until you examine the brain tissue, you can’t know for sure. To diagnose CTE, we look for the buildup of an abnormal protein—a large biological molecule—in specific parts of the brain. In severe cases, areas of the brain are destroyed.

I recently conducted a study of the risks of contact sports to younger athletes’ brains. I found that children who start playing tackle football before the age of 12 are three times more likely to have behavioral and mood problems than those who start playing after that age.

Don’t let worry about a brain disease prevent you from being an athlete. Keep being active and involved in sports. But talk to your parents about alternatives to playing tackle football until you are older. Young people need to protect the most important organ in their body from being hit potentially hundreds of times per season. Some of the NFL’s most successful players didn’t play tackle football until high school.