Study Find Brain Damage in Former NFL Players

Until now, we couldn’t see evidence of chronic traumatic encephalopathy until autopsy.

If you happen to be reading this on a Sunday, Monday, or Thursday and live in the United States, there’s a good chance you’re watching NFL football tonight. 20 million people on average tune into these games, myself included. Go Eagles. It was my wife who captured why, I think — football players are simply the best athletes out there in terms of all around ability — strength, speed, power, and so on.

But of course there’s something else that draws us to these games — something a bit more primal — it’s, for lack of a better word, the hits. The tackles, the sacks, the bone-crunching collisions.

But it’s hard to fully enjoy the games if you’ve done a bit of reading into chronic traumatic encephalopathy — CTE — and the effect these collisions have on the individuals who play professional Football.

A recent autopsy study out of Boston University examined the brains of 376 former NFL players. 345 of those brains had evidence of CTE — that’s 92%.

Of course there is selection bias at play here — NFL players who donate their brains to science after their death are likely to do so for a reason. But it is getting pretty hard to deny…