CTE found in Hilinski Suicide

[whaler11]

A family's search for why after QB's suicide

That is scary.

 

[uconnphil2016]

Stuff is wild. It’s present in amateur athletes as well, which was previously not believed. My good friend was a hockey player who committed suicide and had his brain donated, he had CTE. He never even played college hockey.

 

[ShakyTheMohel]

A family's search for why after QB's suicide

That is scary.

What a sad story. Hard to predict where football is going to end up when you read stories like this.

 

[whaler11]

What a sad story. Hard to predict where football is going to end up when you read stories like this.

MMA exists. So I suppose they will keep taking half measures to make things more ‘safe’ which will only be marginally effective.

You’ll probably see the participant pool contract some. Smaller high schools will end up with co-ops, smaller colleges will start to drop the sport.

How does the NESCAC offering football align - we have these really smart kids - let’s go injure their brains for no ROI?

How does a broke CCSU sponsor brain injuries at such a high monetary cost? Bates versus Mass Maritime? Other than tradition what’s the point.

I wouldn’t expect the level of play at the D1/NFL level to change much for at least a few decades.

 

[CL82]

Makes you think about every time you ever got your bell rung playing. Scary stuff. Like Shaky, you have to wonder if football can survive this issue.

 

[uconndogs]

MMA exists. So I suppose they will keep taking half measures to make things more ‘safe’ which will only be marginally effective.

You’ll probably see the participant pool contract some. Smaller high schools will end up with co-ops, smaller colleges will start to drop the sport.

How does the NESCAC offering football align - we have these really smart kids - let’s go injure their brains for no ROI?

How does a broke CCSU sponsor brain injuries at such a high monetary cost? Bates versus Mass Maritime? Other than tradition what’s the point.

I wouldn’t expect the level of play at the D1/NFL level to change much for at least a few decades.

I think that’s a really good synopsis. That said, I think the changes to US football could be very dramatic and within 20 years I could see it looking like rugby.

Theses stories are sad beyond words.

 

[HawkHusky]

That's crazy (a 65 year old's brain) and very sad.

 

[JMick]

Makes you think about every time you ever got your bell rung playing. Scary stuff. Like Shaky, you have to wonder if football can survive this issue.

I only played youth and HS football and as far as I can remember only got one possible concussion. What worries me more is all the talk about the non-concussive hits that add up. I won't be surprised if in 10 years hitting is outlawed until 8th grade or high school. I'm surprised the youth leagues can still get insurance.

 

[Rocktheworld]

That's crazy (a 65 year old's brain) and very sad.

And despite that subjective judgment, that's only clinically diagnosed as Stage 1? Stage 1 is your brain looks like someone 60+ years* older than you? And so the brain of an elderly man can handle a university course load, and manage the game of football from the position of quarterback at a high-level D1 program? Sorry but I have to be a little skeptical there. And that report is all I really cared about, like 2 paragraphs and the whole rest of it is a sad story.

I dunno. Nobody knows. Nobody has a clue what was going on inside the kid, what he felt like he was dealing with. Apparently symptoms generally appear 8-10 years after the repeated blows begin, but nobody barely caught anything in his behavior. He just didn't respond to mom and dad's texts as much while he was away at college. Edit if the actual point of the article besides the sad story was to show how easy and quick it is to develop CTE playing football, even if just Stage 1 (whatever that actually means), we kind of already knew that. We know that kids are getting concussed before they hit puberty.

So I just looked it up just on wikipedia and apparently you don't really display depression and suicidality until stage 3 (we've mostly seen older retired football players and wrestlers commit suicide), after already displaying "First-stage symptoms include attention deficit hyperactivity disorder as well as confusion, disorientation, dizziness, and headaches. Second-stage symptoms include memory loss, social instability, impulsive behavior, and poor judgment".

I also pieced together that the reason that we still can't currently adequately test for CTE on the living is because you need to run specific chemical tests to the brain in order to stage it. So that puts the "old man brain" comment even more on ice; I don't think some subjective view of the external anatomy of the brain is an important or necessarily useful part of diagnosing and staging the disease.

And this, which is actually scary for players of collision/contact sports

"A putative biomarker for CTE is the presence in serum of autoantibodies against the brain. The autoantibodies were detected in football players who experienced a large number of head hits but no concussions, suggesting that even sub-concussive episodes may be damaging to the brain. The autoantibodies may enter the brain by means of a disrupted blood-brain barrier, and attack neuronal cells which are normally protected from an immune onslaught.[21] "

*doctors don't refer to 65 year olds as "old men" IME, gotta be at least 75 for that I figure.

 

[J187Money]

Agree with Whaler on that. The pro level (and high college level) will be driven by $. As long as the money is there, there will be a line of people to sign up for this no matter what. People would participate in a real world Hunger Games if there was a big enough purse.

 

[IMind]

Stuff is wild. It’s present in amateur athletes as well, which was previously not believed. My good friend was a hockey player who committed suicide and had his brain donated, he had CTE. He never even played college hockey.

Both my kids play ice hockey, and I worry about it. The sport definitely needs to change. Get fighting out, improve reffing (most refs let too much head contact go), and the fact that they don't pad the boards when the kids are young is absurd. Most bad injuries I've seen are from kids hitting the boards after loosing an edge. That being said I haven't seen that many head injuries and I've seen thousands of games at every level of the sport. I can count the number of concussions I've seen on one hand. I know a few kids that have missed time because of them... but in more than one case the concussion wasn't hockey related. Life can be rough.... I'm definitely not being dismissive, it absolutely could happen in amateur hockey, there are definite areas that could be improved... but I don't see it as being as big an issue as it is for football.

Fighting though is probably the single biggest issue for the pro game. It's absurd that it's still in the sport. There's literally no upside long term.. and most CTE issues seem to cluster around enforcers and fighting.

 

[huskymedic]

USAT: Why college football player's death should terrify parents

 

[Rocktheworld]

USAT: Why college football player's death should terrify parents

Jesus couldn’t make it past the third paragraph

 

[CL82]

Anyone else feel like the recommendation for kids to wait until they are 12 or 14 to play is a false solution. Pee wee is no more dangerous than soccer or basketball. It is really HS (maybe middle school) when you start getting big hits.

 

[Rocktheworld]

Anyone else feel like the recommendation for kids to wait until they are 12 or 14 to play is a false solution. Pee wee is no more dangerous than soccer or basketball. It is really HS (maybe middle school) when you start getting big hits.

But we know you don’t need big hits or obvious acute symptoms of confusion for damage to be done. That’s why young kids and hockey end up so bad too, just tons of lower-impact but still potentially damaging blows.

I think that one huge aspect of especially football players ending up with CTE is non-football stuff in high school. What happens after every high school football game, at least for the star players? Partying and tons of at least drinking. Introducing alcohol within hours of the hit, essentially still in the acute phase of the traumatic injury, surely exacerbated things greatly.

Not sure how many towns have bangers thrown after every high school hockey or soccer game.

 

[cttxus]

Could this be part of the answer? Orange, squishy body armor material could save lives . . .

"It’s bright orange, it’s squishy, it stretches like taffy — and it is unlike any body armor you’ve ever seen. If you were attacked with a baseball bat and you were wearing this bright orange goop under your clothes, then your attacker might as well have swung a toothpick at you — the goop will take the hit for you and absorb the strike."

"This orange goo is so powerful it only requires a thin layer to deliver incredible protection."

"Partnerships, like the D3O liner integration into Schutt’s sports helmets, have helped to make access to this remarkable innovation more available to civilians. Now, football, lacrosse and baseball players can benefit from this advanced trauma protection too."

This orange, squishy body armor material could save lives

 

[Rocktheworld]

Could this be part of the answer? Orange, squishy body armor material could save lives . . .

"It’s bright orange, it’s squishy, it stretches like taffy — and it is unlike any body armor you’ve ever seen. If you were attacked with a baseball bat and you were wearing this bright orange goop under your clothes, then your attacker might as well have swung a toothpick at you — the goop will take the hit for you and absorb the strike."

"This orange goo is so powerful it only requires a thin layer to deliver incredible protection."

"Partnerships, like the D3O liner integration into Schutt’s sports helmets, have helped to make access to this remarkable innovation more available to civilians. Now, football, lacrosse and baseball players can benefit from this advanced trauma protection too."

This orange, squishy body armor material could save lives

Completely different kind of injury prevention. A stable head being hit by an object (as in the example with a bat to a head) is completely different from a moving head initiating contact with an object. This will not at all apply to all closed head injuries, certainly not the kind you see on the football field.

 

[cttxus]

Completely different kind of injury prevention. A stable head being hit by an object (as in the example with a bat to a head) is completely different from a moving head initiating contact with an object. This will not at all apply to all closed head injuries, certainly not the kind you see on the football field.

Yes, hence the words I used in the first sentence: "Could this be part of the answer"

 

[Rocktheworld]

Yes, hence the words I used in the first sentence: "Could this be part of the answer"

Well the answer is no, won’t be part of the solution, because it in no way addresses the intracranial inertia of the brain that is the physiological basis for the kind of trauma that leads to the kind of closed head injuries we see on the field and rink. The only thing that will help prevent these concussions, besides preventing impact in the first place, is to invent a kind of “seatbelt” for the brain that goes within the cranium. The way people fly through windshields is analogous to the physiology of these causes of concussion, where the person is the brain and the car is the cranium

 

[FAIRTIDES]

Well the answer is no, won’t be part of the solution, because it in no way addresses the intracranial inertia of the brain that is the physiological basis for the kind of trauma that leads to the kind of closed head injuries we see on the field and rink. The only thing that will help prevent these concussions, besides preventing impact in the first place, is to invent a kind of “seatbelt” for the brain that goes within the cranium. The way people fly through windshields is analogous to the physiology of these causes of concussion, where the person is the brain and the car is the cranium

Or, maybe, inject the orange goo in to the area between the skull and brain.

 

[champs99and04]

This feels like one of those topics where it's going to be tough to find a completely objective translation. Whenever there is uncertainty, fear is sure to be used as a primary persuasive device. It's difficult for me to determine how much of this can be separated from confirmation bias and the like, especially when the premise is "look at this 20 year old who seemed to have everything, what else could it be?" If we start with the hypothesis that this was something else, we probably find a lot of information pointing us in that direction. The writer is not going to say "come read my article where I tell you how this suicide could have been anything and your guess is as good as mine."

Conversely, a lot of the people looking for something else to blame it on are going to be football fans who don't want to stop watching football. That's obvious.

How do you truly isolate these variables and quantify risk factor? And perhaps more importantly, how do we decide how much risk is too much?

To some extent I do view doctors, scientists, etc. as neutral authority figures on this. But that neutral authority is going to involve them telling us that football is bad for the brain, which anyone could have figured out. They're still predisposed to a certain result just like your mother is predisposed to you wearing a helmet rather than not wearing one.

 

[CL82]

This feels like one of those topics where it's going to be tough to find a completely objective translation. Whenever there is uncertainty, fear is sure to be used as a primary persuasive device. It's difficult for me to determine how much of this can be separated from confirmation bias and the like, especially when the premise is "look at this 20 year old who seemed to have everything, what else could it be?" If we start with the hypothesis that this was something else, we probably find a lot of information pointing us in that direction. The writer is not going to say "come read my article where I tell you how this suicide could have been anything and your guess is as good as mine."

Conversely, a lot of the people looking for something else to blame it on are going to be football fans who don't want to stop watching football. That's obvious.

How do you truly isolate these variables and quantify risk factor? And perhaps more importantly, how do we decide how much risk is too much?

To some extent I do view doctors, scientists, etc. as neutral authority figures on this. But that neutral authority is going to involve them telling us that football is bad for the brain, which anyone could have figured out. They're still predisposed to a certain result just like your mother is predisposed to you wearing a helmet rather than not wearing one.

I get your point, but suicide plus evidence of CTE in the autopsy is more than just confirmation bias.

 

[Adios]

Could this be part of the answer? Orange, squishy body armor material could save lives . . .

"It’s bright orange, it’s squishy, it stretches like taffy — and it is unlike any body armor you’ve ever seen. If you were attacked with a baseball bat and you were wearing this bright orange goop under your clothes, then your attacker might as well have swung a toothpick at you — the goop will take the hit for you and absorb the strike."

"This orange goo is so powerful it only requires a thin layer to deliver incredible protection."

"Partnerships, like the D3O liner integration into Schutt’s sports helmets, have helped to make access to this remarkable innovation more available to civilians. Now, football, lacrosse and baseball players can benefit from this advanced trauma protection too."

This orange, squishy body armor material could save lives

Unreal. I wouldn't be surprised if this incorporated into football equipment. I think it should be.

Game changer.

 

[ZooCougar]

MMA exists. So I suppose they will keep taking half measures to make things more ‘safe’ which will only be marginally effective.

You’ll probably see the participant pool contract some. Smaller high schools will end up with co-ops, smaller colleges will start to drop the sport.

How does the NESCAC offering football align - we have these really smart kids - let’s go injure their brains for no ROI?

How does a broke CCSU sponsor brain injuries at such a high monetary cost? Bates versus Mass Maritime? Other than tradition what’s the point.

I wouldn’t expect the level of play at the D1/NFL level to change much for at least a few decades.

I see it contracting already down here in Missouri. Youth football numbers are way down. A couple schools can’t even field freshmen teams. Soccer and baseball seem to be way more popular down here.

 

[huskymedic]