brain injuries in American football

I’ve been worried about this issue for a long time, though in fact I had missed the specific incident in April that today’s NY Times is talking about. Don’t you find the following a bit disturbing? (The incident has now been linked to brain trauma.)

“Owen Thomas, a popular 6-foot-2, 240-pound lineman for Penn with no previous history of depression, hanged himself in his off-campus apartment after what friends and family have described as a sudden and uncharacteristic emotional collapse.”

MIKE WEBSTER of the Pittsburgh Steelers, possibly the greatest center in the history of the sport, had a post-football life that was always gut-wrenching to hear about, and as a result his death in 2002 at age 50 almost sounded merciful at the time:

“After retirement Webster suffered from amnesia, dementia, depression, and acute bone and muscle pain. He lived out of his pickup truck or train stations between Wisconsin and Pittsburgh, even though his friends and former teammates were willing to rent apartments for him. In his last years Webster lived with his youngest son, Garrett, who though only a teenager at the time, had to act as the parent to his own father. Webster’s wife divorced him six months before his death in 2002.”

Here’s a hypothetical question for you… What are the chances that American football will eventually be ended as a sport by the discovery of brain injury risk? After all, here as with boxing there’s not much you can do to minimize that risk without changing the sport beyond recognition.

It might seem wildly unrealistic to think that the very existence of a sport would be at risk, but 40 years ago our current public anti-smoking regime would have sounded laughable as well. I really wonder about the future of football, the more of these stories I read. One of my high school friends suffered a broken neck playing in a high school football game. A broken neck for a 17-year-old (he luckily escaped paralysis). We treat that as an acceptable risk right now, but I wonder if that can go on forever.

Here’s a medical website that wants A BAN ON FOOTBALL AT THE HIGH SCHOOL LEVEL, for reasons that don’t sound pretty:

“What’s alarming is the presence of abnormal collections of a protein known as tau, one of the proteins one sees in cases of Alzheimer disease, in brains of young ex-football players. As an example, McKee provides photomicrographs from a case of an 18-year-old high school football player and says: ‘He’s got all this tau. This is frontal and this is insular…. This is completely inappropriate. You don’t see tau like this in an 18-year-old. You don’t see tau like this in a fifty year old.'”

At the very least, if I had kids that age I would strongly discourage them from playing.