Concussions in the NFL: Health risk for players, PR disaster for the league
By Dani Bostick
Standing behind shady science
In 2007 the NFL to added new members to the Committee on Mild Traumatic Brain Injury including Dr. Joseph Maroon, a vice chairman of neurosurgery from the University of Pittsburgh, and two professors of neurosurgery, one from Duke and the other from Mount Sinai School of Medicine.
And yet the information coming from NFL experts still does not agree with other independent research. Dr. Maroon’s stance on CTE is that it is an exaggerated problem and that football is safer that riding a bicycle or skateboard. He said to ESPN earlier this year, “I think the problem of CTE although real, is it’s being overexaggerated and being extrapolated to youth football and high school football… It’s a rare phenomena. We have no idea the incidence. There are.. more injuries to kids falling off bikes, scooters, falling in playgrounds than there are in youth football.”
The Centers for Disease Control, however, determined that competitive contact sports are leading causes of head injury among young people ages 10-19. Chris Nowinski of the Boston-based Sports Legacy Institute explained, via ESPN, that the risk of repeated blows to the head, “In addition, it is not just concussions that make football dangerous for the brain, but it is also hundreds of subconcussive blows per year. Riding a bike or skateboard are not known to cause hundreds of impact to the head in a year.”
Maroon also appears skeptical about the pervasiveness of CTE among retired professional football players. In 2013 when Pro Football Hall of Famer Tony Dorsett said he had been diagnosed with symptoms related to CTE, Maroon insinuated in an interview that Dorsett’s neurological decline could be due to old age. He said, “This is very, very preliminary. There are many, many causes of dementia or progressive memory loss, particularly when you get over 60 or 70 years of age like Tony is.”
Dorsett and his doctors at UCLA, however, have linked is memory loss, suicidality, and depression to CTE. Earlier in the year he said, “But, obviously, not knowing that the end was going to be like this. But I love the game. The game was good to me. It’s just unfortunate that I’m going through what I’m going through.”
Tony Dorsett is not the only retired player facing these troubling symptoms, and he is not the only player diagnosed with signs of CTE while still alive. Though Maroon attributed the 59-year-old’s health problems to old age, 52-year-old NFL All-Pro Leonard Marshall also underwent testing at UCLA and received the same diagnosis, along with 62-year old Hall of Famer Joe DeLamielleure.
Researchers have proven that concussions exacerbate declines associated with aging, refuting Maroon’s claim that older players’ symptoms could be a function of old age alone. Munro Cullum of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical center conducted research published in JAMA Neurology that found NFL players who have suffered concussion show signs of cognitive impairment. He said, via Time, “We know that normal aging itself is associated with some declines in both hippocampal volume as well as memory function, but it seems that those declines are accentuated when there is a concussion, and when there is a concussion with loss of consciousness.”
DeLamielleure said he never was diagnosed with a concussion while he was playing professional football, but knows he sustained many blows to the head. His situation is not unusual. It is estimated that nearly 50% of athletes do not feel symptoms after a concussive blow. Now the Hall of Famer believes his anxiety, chronic insomnia, mood swings, and suicidal thoughts are linked to football. He told ESPN, “I can guarantee you my CTE, my tau, came from hits, came from blows to the head.”
These players are still alive, but Mike Webster, Junior Seau, and many others have died, their brains posthumously revealing CTE due to repeated blows to the head.
Over four thousand former players have sued the NFL and are in the middle of reaching a $765 million settlement, having argued the NFL hid the connection between football and brain damage. It is troubling that Maroon, an expert in charge of reducing the brain injury in the NFL, believes the problem is overstated. ESPN has also reported that Maroon’s own concussion evaluation system, ImPACT, has been heavily criticized for lack of scientific validity and conflicts of interest. William Barr, a professor of neurology and psychiatry at NYU, critiqued, “Through amazing marketing, the ImPACT guys have made their name synonymous with testing, but there’s growing awareness that ImPACT doesn’t have the science behind it to do what it claims it does.”
(Interestingly, Maroon is also the medical director of the WWE, another organization mired with concussion-related scandal and legal action.)
Next: Head injuries happen all of the time