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Degenerative Brain Disease Found In Nearly All Donated NFL Player Brains, Says Study (npr.org)
A new study published Tuesday in the journal American Medical Association found that 110 out of 111 brains of those who played in the NFL had degenerative brain disease chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE). NPR reports: In the study, researchers examined the brains of 202 deceased former football players at all levels. Nearly 88 percent of all the brains, 177, had CTE. Three of 14 who had played only in high school had CTE, 48 of 53 college players, 9 of 14 semiprofessional players, and 7 of 8 Canadian Football League players. CTE was not found in the brains of two who played football before high school. According to the study's senior author, Dr. Ann McKee, "this is by far the largest [study] of individuals who developed CTE that has ever been described. And it only includes individuals who are exposed to head trauma by participation in football." A CTE study several years ago by McKee and her colleagues included football players and athletes from other collision sports such as hockey, soccer and rugby. It also examined the brains of military veterans who had suffered head injuries. The study released Tuesday is the continuation of a study that began eight years ago. In 2015, McKee and fellow researchers at the Department of Veterans Affairs and Boston University published study results revealing 87 of 91 former NFL players had CTE.
Every single concussion comes with an extent of brain damaged aligned to the severity of the concussion, every single one https://www.brainline.org/arti.... The more concussions you suffer and the worse they are, the greater your accumulated brain damage. The reason you are concussed is because, yes you brain suffered sufficient impact to cause it harm, that is why you feel concussed. It's like never damaged, bruised nerves, means in those millions of nerve bundles some where broken, severed, ceased to function, resulting in diminished capacity, as for the brain. As different parts of the brain do different things, the direction of the impact has a significant impact on the outcome, some being much more dangerous than others. What probably saves jock straps from more behaviourally visible reduce cerebral function is smaller brains in thicker skulls, with fewer neuron connections and the types of activity they indulge in, not much mental function is required for the activity, in fact reduced mental function is desirable for repetitive training behaviours.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
The BBC version of this story actually discusses the sample bias, and the director of the CTE center is quoted fully acknowledging that there's enormous bias.
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-...
The best way to predict the future is to invent it.
While what you say is true but there is considerable evidence showing that the correlation is due to causation. It only occurs in sports where there is repetitive head injury and the effect is apparently similar to those produced when a head is subject to a "blast" and has not been immobilized first according to the Wikipedia page.
Correlation does not equal causation. Just because all professional NFL players appear to have brain damage, it does not mean that football causes brain damage.
Snark all you want but in this case this isn't mere correlation. The condition in question Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy. Key word there is traumatic. You get that by being hit in the head and receiving brain damage as a result of being concussed. It's the exact same condition seen in boxers and MMA fighters and hockey players and rugby players and soldiers who get concussed repeatedly. So yes it absolutely does mean that playing football in the NFL is a cause for many players of serious brain injury. The fact that some players manage to avoid such injury does not mean that a cause/effect relationship is not in play. It simply means that some managed to avoid getting concussed during their playing career. Your claim is similar to saying smoking doesn't cause cancer because not every smoker gets cancer.
Correlation does not imply causation.
Getting hit in the head is a proven cause of CTE. Professional football players get hit in the head commonly. Professional football players have CTE commonly. There is no other known cause of CTE aside from getting hit in the head. QED playing professional football is a common cause of CTE. The causal chain is quite intact here. The fact that some players manage to avoid brain injury while playing football does not change that causal chain.
This study had several limitations. First, a major limitation is ascertainment bias associated with participation in this brain donation program. Although the criteria for participation were based on exposure to repetitive head trauma rather than on clinical signs of brain trauma, public awareness of a possible link between repetitive head trauma and CTE may have motivated players and their families with symptoms and signs of brain injury to participate in this research. Therefore, caution must be used in interpreting the high frequency of CTE in this sample, and estimates of prevalence cannot be concluded or implied from this sample.
Prediction for end of Universe #42: Fencepost error in Quantum_bogosort.cpp
The set of players posthumously tested by Dr. McKee is far from a random sample of N.F.L. retirees. “There’s a tremendous selection bias,” she has cautioned, noting that many families have donated brains specifically because the former player showed symptoms of C.T.E.
But 110 positives remain significant scientific evidence of an N.F.L. player’s risk of developing C.T.E., which can be diagnosed only after death. About 1,300 former players have died since the B.U. group began examining brains. So even if every one of the other 1,200 players had tested negative — which even the heartiest skeptics would agree could not possibly be the case — the minimum C.T.E. prevalence would be close to 9 percent, vastly higher than in the general population.