Frontline: League of Denial

Hack article.

 

The first comment from the comment section:

 

I love these articles without any facts.   Football is still the most popular high school sport in the state of MN according to the National Federation of State High School Associations with over 440 programs and over 25,000 boys playing football at the HS level.   That is more then Basketball and Soccer combined (22,000).  That is more than Hockey, Lacrosse, and Wrestling combined (17,000).

 

Football is having to compete for certain athletes more because for profits organizations have turned youth hockey and youth basketball into year around sports.  Travel basketball tryouts are next week.  Hockey pre tryout skating already starting with tryouts starting October 1. 

 

Not all programs are seeing numbers go down but since Reusse only worships at the alter of EP that MUST be the state wide trend.   Maybe check suburbs that are growing or do not have an aging population..... just at thought.    

 

Safety wise...  the number of concussions in football is higher because there are FAR more kids playing football then any other sport in the state (yes including HOCKEY). The rate of concussions in football is the same rate (6 out of 100) as it is in boys hockey, basketball, and soccer.  The rates of concussions are higher for girls hockey and basketball then they are for football.  Not my opinion those are the facts.   

 

So by Reusse theory .... in 20 years all sports will vanish. Right...  

 

tick tick tick

 

87 of 91 ex-NFL players have tested positive for the brain disease CTE at one of the nation's leading brain banks. http://t.co/kfu3o0hkH7

— Jason Breslow (@jbrezlow) September 18, 2015

That's 96 percent of NFL players who were tested for CTE. For all players, the rate was 79 percent: http://t.co/kfu3o0hkH7

— Jason Breslow (@jbrezlow) September 18, 2015

I think most players feel the same way as Crabtree.

 

What an exciting way to start my weekend. I probably have CTE. https://t.co/1Ct0MK9qCT

— Tom Crabtree (@itsCrab) September 18, 2015

That's why the "would you do it all again?" question is hard. I need to answer it in 50 years. If i can.

— Tom Crabtree (@itsCrab) September 18, 2015

SI has a link to a piece by our old pal Ty Dunne on concussions

 

http://bills.buffalonews.com/2...es-to-haunt-the-nfl/

 

“The earlier you start and the more packs of cigs per day, the greater your risk,” he said. “So we made a decision as that data became clear that children aren’t allowed to smoke. And I think that’s the move that we have to take with football from a pure public health/environmental exposure perspective.”

 

Eliminate contact at a young age and the effects of CTE would be less or, at least, postponed.

 

Football was never invented for children in the first place, Nowinski says. Those 300 hits a year at 9, 10, 11 years old add up.

 

“So the clear prescription here is that we no longer hit children in the head 300 times every fall before their body and brain has any chance to mature,” he said. “It’s a huge change to the business of football but it’s not really a change to the game at all.”

 

 

Our kids don't need to play tackle football...

 

Agreed - kids should not be playing tackle football. The problem will be to define when it's "safer" to let them start getting hit. Brain development (especially for males) of the frontal lobes isn't complete until your late 20s. The frontal lobes are what is most often affected by CTE. The frontal lobe does the following (Wikipedia definition).

 

"The function of the frontal lobe involves the ability to project future consequences resulting from current actions, the choice between good and bad actions (or better and best), the override and suppression of socially unacceptable responses, and the determination of similarities and differences between things or events.

The frontal lobe also plays an important part in retaining longer term memories which are not task-based. These are often memories associated with emotions derived from input from the brain's limbic system. The frontal lobe modifies those emotions to generally fit socially acceptable norms."

 

To fully implement the recommendations to wait until brain development is over until playing football, you'd probably have to wait until you were about 28-30.

Outlier Terry Bradshaw. Not any more punch drunk than when he was thirty.

There probably is a big genetic component to this. I'd be shocked if the ApoE gene status didn't play a role. One particular relatively common variant of it is already a very well known risk factor for Alzheimer's Disease. However, there is no way the NFL wants to go in the direction of a genetic test to see who's most at risk for CTE.

During halftime of the Champions League game today, there was a lawyer ad for NFL players to call if they're suffering from any neurological disorders, to get a slice of that sweet sweet settlement money.

Usually those dishonest lawyer ads are for "victims" of bad drugs or other medical malpractice.

really good insight Michigan

And I can already hear the lawyers arguing that while the genetic test may indicate increased risk...its not definitive. Heck, they are still fighting about hGH testing which was "approved" in 2012.

 

UCLA researchers have developed some imaging tests that show promise for assessing the living brains instead of just post-mortem.

 

http://directorsblog.nih.gov/2...atic-encephalopathy/

 

By analyzing the PET scans, Barrio and colleagues identified four distinctive patterns of tau tangles in brains of the former football players that didn’t appear in the brains of normal controls. Researchers said these patterns appear to parallel the damage that occurs from a concussion, starting in the midbrain; advancing outwards to subcortical areas and the amygdala—a region of the brain that controls anxiety and response to stress; and finally moving into the cerebral cortex. They also found that locations of the four tau patterns by PET scan were generally consistent with brain tissue pathology reports from autopsies of several athletes with confirmed CTE, though the prominence of the signal in the midbrain was unexpected.

 

I suspect you're right - there is likely a genetic component to it, but I also am guessing that genetic tests won't change a players' mind about playing. A brain scan that shows actual deleterious affects may be a more potent tool in helping players make decisions about their future in the game. There's so much more to learn... and even with more and better info, many will choose to take the risk to play the game they love.

That's why Ootball isn't going away, it'll just morph into a less dangerous version than the one we grew up with.

If they are finding damage on PET scans that is starting in the midbrain and radiating outward, that suggests that it's not simply the frontal lobes that are being affected from the direct impact, but that there is also rotational, or torque, injuries that occur from a twisting motion during impact.  No surprising I guess but definitely serious.  Makes me wonder if different positions are more vulnerable to different types of concussive injuries.