NFL player Junior Seau had brain disease CTE

[Eugene]

Source: Associated Press

AP foreign, Thursday January 10 2013

BARRY WILNER

AP Pro Football Writer= Junior Seau, one of the NFL's best and fiercest players for nearly two decades, had a degenerative brain disease when he committed suicide last May, the National Institutes of Health told The Associated Press on Thursday.

Results of an NIH study of Seau's brain revealed abnormalities consistent with chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE).

"The brain was independently evaluated by multiple experts, in a blind fashion," said Dr. Russell Lonser, who oversaw the study. "We had the opportunity to get multiple experts involved in a way they wouldn't be able to directly identify his tissue even if they knew he was one of the individuals studied."

The NIH, based in Bethesda, Md., conducted a study of three unidentified brains, one of which was Seau's. It said the findings on Seau were similar to autopsies of people "with exposure to repetitive head injuries."

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Read more: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/feedarticle/10604763

[hlthe2b]

1. Is there any other sport where this level of head trauma is so frequent?

(outside of boxing, of course).... Tragic.

[Blue_Tires]

2. well, to be fair, I think hockey is just scratching the surface

of some of their head trauma issues...

[groundloop]

8. No, I don't believe hockey is nearly as bad as football

All the hitting in hockey is when you're more or less upright, you lead with the shoulders and hips. Granted, there's the occasion when your helmeted head smacks the glass or you go down and you smack the ice but that's not all the time. (I played up through college).

In football there are certain players whose helmet/head is involved in nearly every play. That, I believe, is the problem.

Also, there's an article in Popular Science about advances in helmet technology which help prevent concussion. One of the things they admit is that helmet manufacturers are reluctant to upgrade their products for fear that would be seen as an admission that there is something wrong with their current products. One of the interesting items in that article is that it's been found that rotational forces are a bigger contributor to concussions than linear forces. Unfortunately nearly all current helmet technology is designed and tested for linear forces.

[AngryAmish]

4. Only boxing

No way, no how is my kid getting on a football field. Unless he is mowing it.

[greymattermom]

5. the sport with the most incidence of concussion

is cheerleading. One thing that would help this would be to stop calling this "concussion" and start calling it what it really is: mild traumatic brain injury. I'm an expert in this field.

[AAO]

6. It's too bad that (it seems) that the level of concussion

can be almost unnoticeable even by the players themselves. It's the continued, long term sustained accumulation of even very mild concussions that is the problem.

I don't see any real solution except not to play the game. Which sucks because I live and breath Green Bay Packers.

[politrixjunkie]

9. I also have been doing some work in this field

Not in a medical sense. I write stuff for kids who've had deployed parents who came home from deployments with mTBI.
Sad stuff!

[Throckmorton]

10. I have added your statement to my all time favorite quotes list

"One thing that would help this would be to stop calling this "concussion" and start calling it what it really is: mild traumatic brain injury."

I thnk it is great.

[Marrah_G]

3. So sad

[Odin2005]

7. Oh dear! I can see why he killed himself.

[Redfairen]

11. There's no way to justify amateur football anymore.

It's only a matter of time before youth football leagues start shutting down. It doesn't matter what the NFL or the NCAA do at this point. When people see more and more outcomes like this one they won't let little kids play the game. I think the sport is going to start disappearing a lot sooner than many of its supporters expect.