Post by riczaj01 on Jun 6, 2017 11:36:16 GMT -6
www.yahoo.com/sports/news/setting-record-straight-cte-140859578.html
Setting the record straight on CTE
Eric Adelson,Yahoo Sports
He gives his name as Robert, he played Division I college football for four years, and he is worried about the effects of multiple concussions. He had some outbursts, “rage” in his word, and some of his football friends have as well. For a long time he figured this was an unfortunate part of playing the sport – the aggression of it. Then he heard about legendary NFL linebacker Junior Seau committing suicide and being diagnosed post-mortem with CTE, the brain disease linked with concussions. Suddenly more of his symptoms made sense: maybe CTE is having an effect on him.
“I think it does, just to be honest,” Robert says. “Other athletes I talk to, I know guys with straight depression, thinking suicidal thoughts. Sometimes I have them. I don’t know where they come from. I think CTE does take you to a darker place.”
It’s that darker place that has many doctors very worried.
CTE has become a catch-all reason for troubling symptoms in many athletes. It makes a lot of sense: if you played football or another contact sport, and if you had hits to the head, then maybe you have CTE. It’s impossible to know for sure – at this point, CTE, or chronic traumatic encephalopathy, can be diagnosed only post-mortem – but it’s also impossible to rule out. That has driven a lot of people to excessive fear, experts say.
“There are a lot of people who are convinced they have this condition,” says Beth Pieroth, a Chicago-based neuropsychologist who treats athletes from high school to the pros. “Even those who are not retired pro athletes. The most distressing thing is when you have athletes with a history of one concussion, or two, who are coming in having decided they have CTE and their life is now over. It’s incredibly distressing.”
This kind of concern is becoming common all over the country, according to more than a dozen experts interviewed for this story.
At a concussion conference of neuropsychologists in Cleveland in April, Dr. Summer Ott stood before a room full of colleagues and asked: “Is there a hysteria around concussions?”
Many in the audience nodded.
In her own experience, Ott has seen an increasing number of teenage athletes come to her office with the near-certainty that they have CTE. One told her, “I probably have CTE,” as if he was resigned to it.
After Ott’s speech, Donna Broshek, president of the Sports Neuropsychology Society that put on the conference, was asked how many of the 200 or so members present think appropriate concern over concussions has tipped into fear.
“Everybody,” she says.
And it’s not just the doctors in that room in Cleveland, or even the doctors in the country. Lili-Naz Hazrati, a pathologist at Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children who studies athletes’ brains regularly, has the same worry.
“Athletes are thinking all their problems are CTE,” she explains. “This disease is relentlessly haunting them. I get a lot of phone calls, people saying, ‘I’m sure I have CTE and I’m suffering from it.’ It has made a lot of people desperate.”
Hazrati tells the story of an amateur athlete who suffered from depression and memory loss. “He could not take care of the symptoms,” she says. “They were overwhelming.” In a search for answers, he read about CTE and figured it must be that. He ended up taking his own life.
His brain was sent to Hazrati, who examined it and found no CTE. The young man had vasculitis, which is treatable.
“That is tragic to me,” she says. “It shows what is going on out there.”
What is going on out there is not just the awareness of CTE, which is a great thing. It’s also the presumption of CTE, which is creating emotional problems of its own. And some of the responsibility of that shadow lies with the forces that helped us become aware of CTE in the first place.
____________________
Dr. Ann McKee is one of the leading CTE researchers in the world. (AP)
Dr. Ann McKee is one of the leading CTE researchers in the world. (AP)
Over the course of the past six years, a string of events have thrust CTE into the public consciousness: the suicides of Seau and Dave Duerson; Boston University’s 2015 groundbreaking study that revealed CTE in 87 of 91 deceased NFL players’ brains it examined; the release of the movie “Concussion”; and the NFL’s concussion settlement and subsequent public acknowledgment of a connection between football and CTE.
Today, an otherwise obscure scientific discovery is common knowledge in the majority of American households. According to a Yahoo Sports/YouGov poll, 60 percent of adult Americans are aware of CTE, with most learning about it through media reports. Of those, 43 percent believe there’s a “high chance” of getting CTE if you play high school football. The number grows to 83 percent for the NFL. And among the symptoms respondents believe have definitively been linked to CTE, 50 percent cited suicidal tendencies.
The concern is very real, and why not? Media coverage of a series of tragedies and the concussion issue overall has raised awareness and helped the push toward better safety measures at all levels of athletic play – from youth all the way to the pros. Yet in some cases the reporting has been misleading if not alarmist, according to some experts.
“The media reporting of CTE has been a little bit unbalanced,” says Hal Wortzel, associate professor at the Colorado School of Medicine. “Every time there’s a diagnosis it’s a news piece on CNN. The public hears about CTE as if it’s a definitive scientific conclusion.”
In a search online for the term “What is CTE?”, one of the first results returned will be a Washington Post video published in May, which tries to break down a complicated subject in just two minutes. Near the middle of the clip, the video states that “Boston University’s CTE Center will study Aaron Hernandez’s brain,” followed by this: “Hernandez committed suicide in his jail cell while serving a life sentence for a 2013 murder.” The clip then shows images of Seau and Duerson, NFL players who “also took their own lives … They both suffered from CTE.”
It’s possible that Hernandez had CTE, but grouping him with Seau and Duerson is a startling leap, one without any scientific basis.
Hollywood took some liberties when it came to the movie “Concussion,” says Dr. William Barr, the director of neurophysiology at the NYU School of Medicine. In one scene, Will Smith, playing the roll of Dr. Bennet Omalu, explains the death of former Pittsburgh Steeler Terry Long this way: “Football gave him CTE, and CTE told his brain to drink a gallon of antifreeze.”
“I’m watching it thinking, ‘Oh my God,’ ” Barr says. “That’s terrible.”
Setting the record straight on CTE
Eric Adelson,Yahoo Sports
He gives his name as Robert, he played Division I college football for four years, and he is worried about the effects of multiple concussions. He had some outbursts, “rage” in his word, and some of his football friends have as well. For a long time he figured this was an unfortunate part of playing the sport – the aggression of it. Then he heard about legendary NFL linebacker Junior Seau committing suicide and being diagnosed post-mortem with CTE, the brain disease linked with concussions. Suddenly more of his symptoms made sense: maybe CTE is having an effect on him.
“I think it does, just to be honest,” Robert says. “Other athletes I talk to, I know guys with straight depression, thinking suicidal thoughts. Sometimes I have them. I don’t know where they come from. I think CTE does take you to a darker place.”
It’s that darker place that has many doctors very worried.
CTE has become a catch-all reason for troubling symptoms in many athletes. It makes a lot of sense: if you played football or another contact sport, and if you had hits to the head, then maybe you have CTE. It’s impossible to know for sure – at this point, CTE, or chronic traumatic encephalopathy, can be diagnosed only post-mortem – but it’s also impossible to rule out. That has driven a lot of people to excessive fear, experts say.
“There are a lot of people who are convinced they have this condition,” says Beth Pieroth, a Chicago-based neuropsychologist who treats athletes from high school to the pros. “Even those who are not retired pro athletes. The most distressing thing is when you have athletes with a history of one concussion, or two, who are coming in having decided they have CTE and their life is now over. It’s incredibly distressing.”
This kind of concern is becoming common all over the country, according to more than a dozen experts interviewed for this story.
At a concussion conference of neuropsychologists in Cleveland in April, Dr. Summer Ott stood before a room full of colleagues and asked: “Is there a hysteria around concussions?”
Many in the audience nodded.
In her own experience, Ott has seen an increasing number of teenage athletes come to her office with the near-certainty that they have CTE. One told her, “I probably have CTE,” as if he was resigned to it.
After Ott’s speech, Donna Broshek, president of the Sports Neuropsychology Society that put on the conference, was asked how many of the 200 or so members present think appropriate concern over concussions has tipped into fear.
“Everybody,” she says.
And it’s not just the doctors in that room in Cleveland, or even the doctors in the country. Lili-Naz Hazrati, a pathologist at Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children who studies athletes’ brains regularly, has the same worry.
“Athletes are thinking all their problems are CTE,” she explains. “This disease is relentlessly haunting them. I get a lot of phone calls, people saying, ‘I’m sure I have CTE and I’m suffering from it.’ It has made a lot of people desperate.”
Hazrati tells the story of an amateur athlete who suffered from depression and memory loss. “He could not take care of the symptoms,” she says. “They were overwhelming.” In a search for answers, he read about CTE and figured it must be that. He ended up taking his own life.
His brain was sent to Hazrati, who examined it and found no CTE. The young man had vasculitis, which is treatable.
“That is tragic to me,” she says. “It shows what is going on out there.”
What is going on out there is not just the awareness of CTE, which is a great thing. It’s also the presumption of CTE, which is creating emotional problems of its own. And some of the responsibility of that shadow lies with the forces that helped us become aware of CTE in the first place.
____________________
Dr. Ann McKee is one of the leading CTE researchers in the world. (AP)
Dr. Ann McKee is one of the leading CTE researchers in the world. (AP)
Over the course of the past six years, a string of events have thrust CTE into the public consciousness: the suicides of Seau and Dave Duerson; Boston University’s 2015 groundbreaking study that revealed CTE in 87 of 91 deceased NFL players’ brains it examined; the release of the movie “Concussion”; and the NFL’s concussion settlement and subsequent public acknowledgment of a connection between football and CTE.
Today, an otherwise obscure scientific discovery is common knowledge in the majority of American households. According to a Yahoo Sports/YouGov poll, 60 percent of adult Americans are aware of CTE, with most learning about it through media reports. Of those, 43 percent believe there’s a “high chance” of getting CTE if you play high school football. The number grows to 83 percent for the NFL. And among the symptoms respondents believe have definitively been linked to CTE, 50 percent cited suicidal tendencies.
The concern is very real, and why not? Media coverage of a series of tragedies and the concussion issue overall has raised awareness and helped the push toward better safety measures at all levels of athletic play – from youth all the way to the pros. Yet in some cases the reporting has been misleading if not alarmist, according to some experts.
“The media reporting of CTE has been a little bit unbalanced,” says Hal Wortzel, associate professor at the Colorado School of Medicine. “Every time there’s a diagnosis it’s a news piece on CNN. The public hears about CTE as if it’s a definitive scientific conclusion.”
In a search online for the term “What is CTE?”, one of the first results returned will be a Washington Post video published in May, which tries to break down a complicated subject in just two minutes. Near the middle of the clip, the video states that “Boston University’s CTE Center will study Aaron Hernandez’s brain,” followed by this: “Hernandez committed suicide in his jail cell while serving a life sentence for a 2013 murder.” The clip then shows images of Seau and Duerson, NFL players who “also took their own lives … They both suffered from CTE.”
It’s possible that Hernandez had CTE, but grouping him with Seau and Duerson is a startling leap, one without any scientific basis.
Hollywood took some liberties when it came to the movie “Concussion,” says Dr. William Barr, the director of neurophysiology at the NYU School of Medicine. In one scene, Will Smith, playing the roll of Dr. Bennet Omalu, explains the death of former Pittsburgh Steeler Terry Long this way: “Football gave him CTE, and CTE told his brain to drink a gallon of antifreeze.”
“I’m watching it thinking, ‘Oh my God,’ ” Barr says. “That’s terrible.”
