If you happen to be watching this on a Sunday, Monday, or Thursday and live in the United States, there’s a good chance you’re watching NFL football tonight. Twenty million people on average tune in to 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 it’s hard to fully enjoy the games if you’ve done a bit of reading into chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) and the effect that 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, selection bias is 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 that there is a clear link between NFL play and what amounts to brain damage, at least qualitatively.
Learn More: https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/997862
