You’re My Special Tea Cup

Study of Former NFL Players Finds 1 in 3 Believes They Have CTE

New study of nearly 2,000 former NFL players found that 34 percent think they have CTE, a condition it is not yet possible to confirm in a living person... The study — conducted by a team including researchers from Harvard Medical School, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Massachusetts General Hospital, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital who are part of the Football Players Health Study at Harvard University — is published Sept. 23 in JAMA Neurology. According to the study, players who believed they had CTE reported significantly more cognitive problems and a higher proportion of low testosterone, depression, mood instability, headaches, chronic pain, and head injury compared with those who did not have concerns about CTE.

-via Harvard Medical School news, September 24, 2024. And look, the can even get more juicy headlines fearmongering about testosterone levels!! For a reason that actually fucking exists this time!!

--

In fact, they don't even need to ban football entirely - we're starting to have the data that COULD be used to launch a massive public health and reform campaign to protect kids from debilitating injuries, mental health crises, and suicide!!

But you know, then we wouldn't be able to force teenage girls (trans and cis) to have a doctor look at their genitals.

We'd have to go after football, which makes billionaires and media companies a fuck ton of money, instead of going after trans kids, who both in the US and globally incredibly vulnerable and, oh yeah, disproportionately likely to have no money.

Example of vital data that we COULD be studying instead of spending millions and millions of dollars faking anti-trans research findings and massively defrauding the public:

New Study Reveals Number and Strength of Head Impacts, Not Concussions, Drive CTE Risk in Football

Does a football player’s number of concussions drive the risk of developing chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE)? In a new study of 631 deceased football players, the largest CTE study to date, scientists found that the number of diagnosed concussions alone was not associated with CTE risk. Instead, football players’ odds of developing CTE were related to both how many head impacts they received and how hard the head impacts were. The study, conducted by researchers at Mass General Brigham, Harvard Medical School, and Boston University (BU), was published today in Nature Communications. It used an innovative new tool called a positional exposure matrix (PEM) that synthesized data from 34 independent studies to estimate the number and severity of football players’ head impacts over their careers. “These results provide added evidence that repeated non-concussive head injuries are a major driver of CTE pathology rather than symptomatic concussions, as the medical and lay literature often suggests,” said study senior author Jesse Mez, MD, MS, Associate Professor at the BU Chobanian and Avedisian School of Medicine and Co-Director of Clinical Research at the BU CTE Center. The new data could provide football with a playbook to prevent CTE in current and future players, according to researchers.

-via Mass General Brigham, June 20, 2023

--

Notes for clarification:

This post is not saying I think we should ban football, although I do genuinely believe that we do have an ethical obligation to massively overhaul how football

All of this also applies to and has been found in other contact sports involving head impacts, including soccer (also aka football), hockey, rugby, and wrestling - all huge high school and professional sports

I'm using the sports terminology I am because I am in the United States (and so are most of the fearmongering media billionaires who own the vast majority of news outlets)

That last point specifically includes all major television news, plus over the course of the past two decades, the LA Times, the Washington Post, and like half of AM radio and local news

And of course lest we forget, it includes Fox News, which COULD use its influence to save the lives and health of literally millions of teenagers who are at massive risk of CTE - or have already developed it!! - due to sports injuries

But the executives at Fox have decided to endanger the lives of different teenagers, whom they like way less, by spreading anti-trans conspiracy theories, propaganda, and lies instead.

So next time, try telling your conservative aunt or neighbor or churchmembers that the REAL danger to kids in sports is brain damage from collisions: "Do you know if your school uses equipment that's rated to help prevent head injuries? Have you seen the statistics on how many kids get lifelong brain damage from playing high school sports? Have you seen the numbers on how many former student athletes commit suicide? That's what I'm worried about - as many as 40% of student athletes might have brain damage, while only like .01% of student athletes are trans. If we want to protect millions of kids, we should start with the thing that affects millions of kids!"