NFL player Junior Seau had brain disease CTE
Source: Associated Press
AP foreign, Thursday January 10 2013
BARRY WILNER
AP Pro Football Writer= Junior Seau, one of the NFL's best and fiercest players for nearly two decades, had a degenerative brain disease when he committed suicide last May, the National Institutes of Health told The Associated Press on Thursday.
Results of an NIH study of Seau's brain revealed abnormalities consistent with chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE).
"The brain was independently evaluated by multiple experts, in a blind fashion," said Dr. Russell Lonser, who oversaw the study. "We had the opportunity to get multiple experts involved in a way they wouldn't be able to directly identify his tissue even if they knew he was one of the individuals studied."
The NIH, based in Bethesda, Md., conducted a study of three unidentified brains, one of which was Seau's. It said the findings on Seau were similar to autopsies of people "with exposure to repetitive head injuries."
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Read more: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/feedarticle/10604763
hlthe2b
(102,234 posts)(outside of boxing, of course).... Tragic.
Blue_Tires
(55,445 posts)of some of their head trauma issues...
groundloop
(11,518 posts)All the hitting in hockey is when you're more or less upright, you lead with the shoulders and hips. Granted, there's the occasion when your helmeted head smacks the glass or you go down and you smack the ice but that's not all the time. (I played up through college).
In football there are certain players whose helmet/head is involved in nearly every play. That, I believe, is the problem.
Also, there's an article in Popular Science about advances in helmet technology which help prevent concussion. One of the things they admit is that helmet manufacturers are reluctant to upgrade their products for fear that would be seen as an admission that there is something wrong with their current products. One of the interesting items in that article is that it's been found that rotational forces are a bigger contributor to concussions than linear forces. Unfortunately nearly all current helmet technology is designed and tested for linear forces.
AngryAmish
(25,704 posts)No way, no how is my kid getting on a football field. Unless he is mowing it.
greymattermom
(5,754 posts)is cheerleading. One thing that would help this would be to stop calling this "concussion" and start calling it what it really is: mild traumatic brain injury. I'm an expert in this field.
AAO
(3,300 posts)can be almost unnoticeable even by the players themselves. It's the continued, long term sustained accumulation of even very mild concussions that is the problem.
I don't see any real solution except not to play the game. Which sucks because I live and breath Green Bay Packers.
politrixjunkie
(42 posts)Not in a medical sense. I write stuff for kids who've had deployed parents who came home from deployments with mTBI.
Sad stuff!
Throckmorton
(3,579 posts)"One thing that would help this would be to stop calling this "concussion" and start calling it what it really is: mild traumatic brain injury."
I thnk it is great.
Marrah_G
(28,581 posts)Odin2005
(53,521 posts)Redfairen
(1,276 posts)It's only a matter of time before youth football leagues start shutting down. It doesn't matter what the NFL or the NCAA do at this point. When people see more and more outcomes like this one they won't let little kids play the game. I think the sport is going to start disappearing a lot sooner than many of its supporters expect.