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waterfield
has a good summary of the study-at least for the lay person
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www.pressreader.com]
This is a very tough, very emotional issue.
Here are some key remarks from that article which IMO help focus things a bit.
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The study’s authors, led by Boston University neuropathologist Ann McKee, cautioned that the study does not suggest severe traumatic brain damage would be found so widely in all who have played football.
“These numbers are very startling and very high, but this is a skewed sample,” McKee told The Times.
he 202 brains examined in the study are called a “convenience sample.” They were donated, typically, by families who had witnessed troubling symptoms that often progressed among players. In many cases of suicide, for instance, donor families strongly suspected that trauma-related brain damage had led to their loved one’s death. And most had played football much longer than is typical, often starting young and continuing to play well into their 20s, McKee said.
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For instance, many of the men whose families reported the most problematic symptoms, including mood disturbances, explosiveness and self-harm, were found to have only mild levels of CTE’s distinctive brain abnormalities, McKee said.
“We wondered whether there’s another pathology we’re not capturing in the data set,” McKee said — factors that, after trauma, might jump-start brain damage, exacerbate it or simply facilitate its spread across the brain. Possibilities include inflammation, the shearing of the fibers that lash neurons together or damage to the brain’s white matter — the fatty bundles of tissue that carry electrical signals among regions and hemispheres.
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In a statement issued Tuesday, NFL spokesman Brian McCarthy said “we appreciate the work done by Dr. McKee and her colleagues.”
The study leaves “many unanswered questions relating to the cause, incidence and prevalence of long-term effects of head trauma,” he added. But the NFL “is committed to supporting scientific research into CTE and advancing progress in the prevention and treatment of head injuries,” he said, citing the League’s commitment in 2016 to spend $100 million to support medical research and engineering advancements on brain science.
