92% of ex-NFL players in university study have brain disease that affects memory, behavior and personality

Researchers at Boston University found that 92% of former NFL players have a brain disorder that affects memory, behavior and personality.

Chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, was identified in a vast majority of the almost 400 former athletes surveyed, according to WCVB Channel 5 Boston. Repetitive head trauma appears to be the leading risk factor for the degenerative brain disorder.

“We have 376 NFL players in the bank and we found CTE in 345, roughly 91.7% of them,” said Dr. Ann McKee, director of the Boston University CTE Center, WCBV5 reported. “To me, this is an unacceptably high risk and it cries out for something to be done.”

Researchers compared the most recent findings on CTE to a 2018 research of brains given for the Framingham Heart Study, which discovered that a former college football player was the only one out of 164 people to have CTE.

According to USA Today, McKee said the CTE center intentionally updated the study during the same week as Super Bowl LVII, noting that the NFL is “very involved” in concussions. A former player from each team in this year’s game was diagnosed with CTE. 

Rick Arrington, a former quarterback for the Philadelphia Eagles, and Ed Lothamer, a former defensive lineman for the Kansas City Chiefs who won Super Bowl IV with the team, both received the diagnosis of the brain illness.

“[The NFL is] not monitoring the amount of head impacts, or intensity of head impacts, they are turning a blind eye to that,” McKee said, according to USA Today. “There is a lot of, ‘If I don’t look at it, it’s not there.'”

However, the league changed its concussion protocol last fall in response to criticism for handling the injury of Miami Dolphins quarterback Tua Tagovailoa.

The rate of CTE discovered by BU researchers is much greater than that in other brain banks, though they do not know how it compares to all current and past NFL players, according to WCVB5.

In 2017, BU reported that 87% of the 202 football players it studied — from high school, college, semi-pro, and the NFL — had CTE. Only one of the 111 professional athletes tested did not receive a diagnosis.

The most recent findings, according to McKee, are a wake-up call to our complacency. According to USA Today, she noted that players are at significant risk of acquiring the disease, and the NFL “hasn’t done anything substantial” to prevent or diagnose it.

CTE can currently only be diagnosed after a person has died. While there is no cure for the disease, there are treatments available.

“I do think the public is becoming wiser to notice these major events,” McKee said, USA Today reported. “But there is still no embrace of the idea that it’s the little hits, where it looks like nothing happened, that lead the players to deteriorate later.”

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