Scientific Evidence - Football Causes Brain Damage
Posted: Sun Apr 18, 2010 1:06 pm
There is an excellent science show called "Catalyst" here on ABC-TV, and last week one of their stories was about how playing football causes brain damage.
You can download a video of that story here -
http://www.abc.net.au/catalyst/stories/2873539.htm
Here is a transcript of it. Keep an eye out for this classic quote in it - "We canâ??t find a healthy brain in an ex-football player."
Ha ha!
You can download a video of that story here -
http://www.abc.net.au/catalyst/stories/2873539.htm
Here is a transcript of it. Keep an eye out for this classic quote in it - "We canâ??t find a healthy brain in an ex-football player."
Ha ha!
ABC-TV wrote: School of Hard Knocks
(15/04/2010)
TRANSCRIPT
Ted Johnson
I would drive to the grocery store specifically to get something, you know, and... leave without getting it.
Chris Nowinski
I couldn't remember any of my friends' names.
NARRATION
Itâ??s been an unspoken secret of life after football...
Andrew Heath
A lot of headaches.
Ted Johnson
The depression, the headaches...
NARRATION
...memory lapses, concentration problems, depression, suicide...
Andrew Heath
You wonder how long's this, how long's this going to go on for.
NARRATION
...caused not by drugs or serious injury, but a normal sporting life of multiple mild concussions.
Dr Anne McKee
The damage in their brains is actually worse than in the worst case of Alzheimer's disease.
Chris Nowinski
We canâ??t find a healthy brain in an ex-football player. Itâ??s quite scary.
Jonica Newby
Football is everywhere in our culture. We love its drama, its gladiatorial battles. But only now is science revealing the true impact of this schooling in hard knocks.
NARRATION
Our story begins with Chris Nowinski. He had the life of your classic all round American hero. He was a Harvard graduate â?? a top college football player. And then he got the call from World Wrestling Entertainment.
Jonica Newby
How much fun was that?
Chris Nowinski
It was a blast. I was a bad guy. I played the snobby Ivy League jerk who liked to tell everyone he was better than them. It became not so fun after I kept getting kicked in the head. I kept getting concussions. And I also kept blowing them off because I never really understood what they were.
NARRATION
So he pushed on, despite chronic headaches and other baffling symptoms.
Chris Nowinski
I had no idea what, what that meant to suddenly develop sleep walking, to not be able to remember conversations, to forget your email password every day.
NARRATION
Forced to quit pro-wrestling after months of not getting better, Chris began researching the medical literature... which finally led him to an expert who could explain. Even minor concussions are cumulative. He had post concussion syndrome.
Chris Nowinski
Had I rested any of the concussions Iâ??d had, I wouldn't be in the position I was in because when you injure the brain and then you keep stressing it, you make the injury much worse. And so when he told me those two things in the fall of '03, I was like you know I've been banging my head for 11 years for fun, never thinking twice about it, like I can't believe no one ever told me that.
NARRATION
Suspecting a hidden epidemic, in 2005, Chris used his academic contacts to co-found a brain bank, and boldly started calling for top sportsmen to donate their brains. Dr Anne McKee is a brain pathologist with over 20 years experience - and a keen football fan. So when the first footballers' brains started turning up, she was curious â?? which soon turned to pure shock.
Dr Anne McKee
Well this is the second NFL football player's brain that I looked at and what we see here is this tremendous build up of tau protein. It shows that there's a brown pigment. And for you to see it with the naked eye is extraordinary. And then if you do magnify the image, you can see it's forming this tangle inside the nerve cell, and eventually it'll cause the nerve cell to die.
Jonica Newby
Wow. So it almost looks like a quarter of these nerve cells are actually dead?
Dr Anne McKee
Oh oh absolutely if not more.
NARRATION
Itâ??s a condition sheâ??d only seen before in boxers - Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy or CTE â?? also known as being punch drunk. Itâ??s a degenerative disease that doesnâ??t show up on brain scans â?? you can only see it once the sufferer is dead.
Jonica Newby
How many brains of footballers do you have now?
Dr Anne McKee
We have 11 football players. We're seeing this change in every single one. So we know a substantial portion of individuals who've played football are going to come down with this disorder.
Jonica Newby
Every single brain so far?
Dr Anne McKee
Right.
NARRATION
Just as startling, the first ex-footballer she saw had never even been knocked out â?? heâ??d only had minor concussions. But perversely, his football helmet, designed to prevent head injury, had allowed another kind of head impact to become part of normal play.
Dr Anne McKee
He'd been a linebacker and in the course of a single season, these individuals probably get about 1500
sub-concussive hits. So it may not be the concussion per se that's important, but just the cumulative effect
of all these minor head traumas over the course of the years.
NARRATION
All of which was worrying news to a man Chris Nowinski met in 2006. Ted Johnson is a genuine American football legend.
Jonica Newby
Look at this neck.
Ted Johnson
22 inches.
Jonica Newby
How do you get a neck that big?
Ted Johnson
Part of it is the hitting. When I take on a blocker, the first thing I hit him with is this part of the helmet. It just happens so fast, I hit him, and try and snap his head back, and then I can get my hands in. I was nicknamed Cement Head Ted.
Jonica Newby
Cement Head Ted?
Ted Johnson
Yeah, I had a hard head.
NARRATION
In a 10 year career with the Patriots, Cement Head Ted helped his team win three Super Bowls. But then came headaches â?? retirement â?? depression â?? and an ongoing suite of personality changes he couldnâ??t explain.
Ted Johnson
I would avoid stressful situations because talking with people I mean would exhaust me, just irritable all the time and that's, that wasn't me. That's just not who I was.
NARRATION
Then Ted saw the brains. It convinced Ted not only to pledge his own brain, but to break his silence and go public.
Ted Johnson
I knew it wasn't going to be popular. I knew I was going against the establishment but this story was so much bigger than football.
Chris Nowinski
So Ted came forward two weeks later before the Super Bowl, before the biggest game of the year, that was more news, and then people just started coming forward.
NARRATION
The story was huge. So huge that in late 2009, Congress announced a special hearing into the problems with football players. So what about Australian sport? We may not have the helmet factor, but our three biggest football codes are all high contact sports. In fact, the big hits are celebrated. Former Wallabies player Andrew Heath, who was originally a maths teacher, copped more than a few.
Andrew Heath
Um, I remember, a bell-ringer, but a big one - I reverted back to childhood, instincts. I thought I was playing AFL. And it took me three or four minutes to realise that I was, ah, the sport that I was actually playing and representing the country in.
NARRATION
After a season when he just kept getting bell ringers, he retired. To his dismay though, the symptoms didnâ??t.
Andrew Heath
Slight headaches, long periods where it's very, very difficult to concentrate.
Jonica Newby
And you have these still, 10 years on?
Andrew Heath
Yeah, absolutely. I've improved it to a point. I'm very happy with where I am. However I know colleagues and friends which have been a lot worse off.
NARRATION
And how about the hundreds of thousands of Australians who play sport at the school or amateur level? Well, many of us donâ??t even know what a concussion is.
Professor Mark Stevenson
In many instances, itâ??s not a loss of consciousness at all, itâ??s things like amnesia, dizziness or loss of coordination, nausea or headache
NARRATION
In a landmark study, Mark Stevensonâ??s group has spent the last three years painstakingly following the concussion incidence of over 3000 amateur rugby players.
Professor Mark Stevenson
10 per cent of those players sustained a concussion. 10 per cent is a very high rate of injury.
NARRATION
More striking â?? those whoâ??d had one concussion were twice as likely to get another one that season.
Professor Mark Stevenson
Why? Some of that we think is they're going back to play before they've truly recovered. A lot of guidelines suggest a three week period out is sufficient. But we think it may be a much longer period.
NARRATION
And if your reaction times are still slowed, youâ??re more likely to get hit again. Itâ??s not known what proportion of sportsmen and women will sustain long term brain injury â?? like post concussion syndrome or CTE - from multiple mild concussions. But a new unpublished study by the American National Football League found former footballers suffered memory disorders at 19 times the normal rate for men aged 30 to 49.
Jonica Newby
Thereâ??s no doubt football codes around the world are trying to tackle the issue. Team doctors are increasingly using psychometric testing to determine whether players are ready to return to play.
NARRATION
But even that isnâ??t mandatory in some codes â?? and very few schools or amateur clubs have access to this kind of tool. Meanwhile, back in America, the entire issue came to a head in October 2009 when Congress met for its hearing.
Chris Nowinsky
A month after those hearings, the NFL said all right we give up, we give up, you're right. We can't fight this anymore. We're, you know, concussions are a problem.
NARRATION
Late 2009, they announced the changes. No return to a game following a concussion. Players can only return to play after being cleared by an independent doctor. And theyâ??d already announced mandatory baseline psychometric testing. Itâ??s nearly everything Chris and his fellow campaigners had asked for â?? though they still want the hitting taken out of practice. In the end, no-one we spoke to wants to kill off their beloved sport. They just want the message out to players of all contact sports. Resist the pressure to simply take the hard knocks.
Chris Nowinski
I used to think that the guys who got concussions were soft. I mean this is only 10 years ago. Like you're not committed. And to think that today three of the top 10 running backs in the NFL are all sitting out right now with concussions. So literally overnight it switched.
Andrew Heath
If you get a bell-ringer, get off the field, put, put your hand up.
Professor Mark Stevenson
Take time out, basically take time out.
