BU Finds CTE in Nearly 92 Percent of Ex-NFL Players Studied
Setting aside for a moment the hype, the glitz, the money, the commercials, the athleticism, the scoreboard, and the beer, chili, and wings—everything that comprises the NFL’s Super Bowl experience this weekend—the cold, sad truth remains that football is taking a horrible toll on some of its players. The extent of that price was made clear Monday in new figures released by the Boston University CTE Center.
According to its latest report, the CTE Center has diagnosed 345 former NFL players with chronic traumatic encephalopathy, out of 376 former players who were studied, a rate of 91.7 percent. Two retired players from the two teams facing off in Super Bowl LVII on Sunday—the Kansas City Chiefs and the Philadelphia Eagles—were among those diagnosed with CTE in the last year. Those ex-players are one-time Eagles quarterback Rick Arrington, who played for them from 1970 to ’73, and former Chiefs defensive tackle Ed Lothamer, who played for two of their Super Bowl teams.
To put those numbers in perspective, a 2018 BU study of 164 brains of men and women donated to the Framingham Heart Study found that only 1 of 164 (less than 1 percent) showed signs of the progressive degenerative brain disease. And that lone CTE case? A former college football player.
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