A new study from Boston University on chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, shows 75% of ex-NFL players who died between 2008 and 2023 showed signs of having the brain disease.
Football consistently tops the charts as the most popular sport for boys to play, but doctors say when a child starts young, the potential lasting impacts on the brain grow more severe with each tackle.
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Amber Nolan, a UW Associate Professor and neuropathologist in the Department of Laboratory Medicine and Pathology, said the symptoms of CTE and traumatic brain injury are prominent.
“There is cognitive impairment, often like what you might see in someone who has Alzheimer’s disease,” Nolan said. “There’s also been more behavioral impairments. People will have depression, anxiety. There’s a lot of sort of mood swings, sort of disinhibition, easily flying off the handle.”
Boston University recently studied more than 2,300 ex-NFL players’ brains after they died. The study found 75% showed signs of CTE.
Nolan said one thing to keep in mind about the study is that those players’ brains were likely donated to science by their loved ones because those players showed signs of CTE and the families wanted answers as to why the person showed symptoms. Nolan says that could skew the study slightly because it’s not a random sample of all former football players.
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Ballard High School Head Football Coach Ian Essig said those numbers aren’t surprising because, for decades, those players were taught to “use their head as an added weapon.”
Essig said now they are promoting different types of tackling after seeing the consequences of heavy tackles each play.
“I hope that us using safe tackling or safe technique where we are keeping the head out of the play, it starts in youth leagues and high school of implementing and teaching the proper technique,” Essig said.
He tells us because of those dangers, all 91 of their players wear Guardian Caps for every practice, game, and walk-through play.
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“They’re a little foam piece that goes over our helmets; they’re easy to pop on and pop off with the Velcro,” Essig said. “They add an extra layer of absorption to our impact, and really they help with the small hits.”
He tells us the caps are already proving they work. So far this year, he said they have seen five concussions in nine games, as compared to an average of four concussions every game.
“I definitely breathe a little sigh of relief when they come back up, and they’re clear-eyed, and they look cognitively there,” Essig said.
But experts say there is still a long way to go before brain injuries are prevented completely.
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“There are concussion protocols that are being followed now that weren’t before, and that’s probably important when someone really is experiencing symptoms that they don’t go out there and hurt their brain more and make it worse,” Nolan said.
