#CTE Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy

[gon-and-killuas-mother]

been learning about CTE (chronic traumatic encephalopathy, aka the thing football players and other contact sport players, as well as first responders and the military, are especially prone to)

and because all paths in my brain lead back to Batman right now, i started wondering if this would ever be a concern to Bruce. obv in a comic book universe we don't (usually) need to worry about permanent injuries (and comic writers aren't typically medical experts lol). and Batman in particular has too much plot armor to be at the mercy of Human Mortality

but like, what if??

Bruce went to medical school, yeah? even if he's no neurological expert, i'd imagine hearing the reports on the correlation between contact sports and CTE might make him consider taking steps to reduce the risks. adjusting his fighting style to keep his head as protected as he can.

the thing is, paranoia, violent behavior, and delusion are some of the prominent symptoms. and uh -glances at Batman's everything- an argument could be made that he's been had CTE, if we ignore how he's able to keep his high intelligence and perfect recall

but! in a world where he's concerned about how taking too many hits to the noggin could lead to literal brain rot, he might even go so far as to fund research into preventative care or even inventing something to reverse the damage/rebuild brain tissue and neural pathways. (the Lazarus Pit could technically serve here, but watch out!)

another sadly common effect of CTE is a personality change for the absolute worst, leading to some horrifying domestic abuse (and murder/suicide, in the more extreme cases). once Bruce adopts Dick, i can see this becoming a bigger concern. what kind of hero is he if his night life causes his brain to deteriorate to the point of harming the kid he promised to protect??

and then there's funky comic book science and alien tech once the Justice League becomes a thing. take too many hits to the head? off to the Watchtower with you to take a dip in non-Lazarus-healing goop!

anyway this is just a train of thought that kept me entertained for a while. like, it's not advisable to apply real medical science to comic book universes, but it's interesting anyways!!

[mywordsfortheuniverse]

Knowing that one day you will wake up and no longer remember the life you have lived is a pain I would never wish on my worse enemy. Perhaps this is why I feel a desperate need to be behind the camera and save every note I am given. I already crave the reassurance that I have existed alongside others.

Barely two decades around the sun but I fear I’m already beginning to forget it all.

[richardsphere]

Leverage Redemption Log: The Turkish Prisoner Job

So that name feels like a reference to the "Spanish Prisoner" (the original form of what is now known as the "Nigerian Prince" con). --- 2 crooked cops sitting in a car, complaining that there isnt enough crime for them to hit a quota. One of them is playing hexagordle or whatever its called. Guy name Delgado is leaving the house (that was the cartel from the OG series wasnt it?) Rodrigo is walking to his car like he's got shit in his pants. Cops plant a gun. And Rodrigo is about to be sent to prison cause crooked cops. --- Harry is at a courthouse trying to talk to a runaway prosecutor. Harry is already working Rodrigo's case. Its Golf Job Girl! (i dont remember your name, thats not an insult im just shit with names)

Its Harry's turn to run a con. (he still doesnt know how to steal a catchphrase) --- Parker is clicking a pen in a car. Parker is right, surveilance is boring. Operation Bigger Fish is a go!

Parker has stolen the free smoothie (come on man, not cool. This guy is only trying to prevent himself from getting framed by the cops.) Cops have taken the bait, Sophie is playing the "criminal" to be targeted. Harry is playing himself. (Sophie has brought on 2 understudies as bodyguards), also Breanna, why are you putting so many cuts into your camerafootage. Jumping from cam 1 to cam 3 every other sentence. --- Ok so the plan is to leave the cops alone around a bunch of cash and cocaine and let them "help themselves" while hidden cameras roll. Simple plan.

Oh Romero's family problems just chased him down in prison. Time for an improvised jailbreak! --- Plan has changed, tell the two stooges that the drug deal has been postponed, then kidnap Rodrigo in court. We can get the stooges vengeance for their victims can wait until after we ensure their victims dont die in prison.

Breanna has set up a botnet to astroturf up an anti-hotsauce factory protest. (probably based on the Irwindale Sriracha lawsuit. Yes i had to google the city.)

Quick read of the signs, prop department should be proud of the simple Jalapeno sign. Good work!

GolfGirl catches onto it pretty quickly that Harry is about to do a thing. (DAQ protocol engaged) Elliot is in a shared holding with Rodrigo.

The coffee is smoking. Cops are walking down the staircase, Beardy boy has a concious. Or at least is worried this might bite them in the behind. Woman is clearly the mastermind. "i did it by the book for years, it got me nowhere". Ah, so thats how we're playing this episode. The instruments of state-sponsored violence cant be evil only misguided cause what if the government wont give our production company their subsidies no more. (even the "evil cops" episode is copaganda nowadays)

And we frame the protesters for a chemical attack. Because the solution to innocent people getting their lives ruined by cops framing them for crimes they didnt commit is to frame a bunch more innocents for crimes they didnt commit. --- And the team enters in hazmat suits. Romero is having a panic attack/asthma thing.

Turns out the cops, while evil, are actually good at their job and now we have our victim charged with attempted jailbreak.

Harry has to make a tough call, cant get into a high-speed chase with the foodtruck (not only does it compromise elliots entire food-based Lucille army, the Lucille Legion is also not meant for stealth not speed) --- Sophie shows Harry her Eiffel Tower Salesman Trunk, mentions her mentor. (we're seeding more Sophie Lore) Harry has homework.

Covers arent blown, they're recyclable. (Narco in town on mysterious business, Federal officer in jail.) --- Did these bodies get buried in a tic-tac-toe formation normally, or did Breanna make this entire setpiece from scratch in an actual graveyard?

Sophie arrives to let Breanna and Parker "die" in character now that our cops are hooked. Elliot warns us that another hit is coming in the morning. (we're gonna have to kill this guy and set him up with the Leverage Witness Protection Division) --- Elliot reminds Rodrigo that the real bad-guy here is still theoretically the as-of-yet unidentified housing corpo that is bribing a congressman into presuring the cops. (if these people dont get rounded up at the end of episode, it'll all feel sort of hollow)

Elliot pretends to be a fellow gang-member/hitman angry that Rodrigo isnt actually a delgado.

Huh, using a key as a hilt on a shiv. Creative.

Cops are here to break out Elliot and Rodrigo. --- Old gator-zoo abandoned after Katrina. (turns out you dont need ghosts when you have Gators)

"im not a moron i just have a lot of concussions", His constant references to sportsball. Are we really weaving in a CTE storyline in the middle of this Evil Cops story? If so, its a verry nuanced characterdetail to give our crook of the week.

Billy Brainbash is starting to recognise Elliot from somewhere. --- The un-tied boat (untied as in "was never tied" not as in "has had the tie-ing undone") buys us enough time to fake a gator attack without needing to blank their guns.

Ok even if the guns werent blanks we just unloaded them on the "gators" so Sophie is safe.

Flashback shows Breanna making Gatordroids (i mean didnt even need a flashback. The gators were pretty clearly props by the way Elliot dropped them. Or maybe im just getting too familiar with the show) --- Meanwhile our crooked cops are at (presumeably the prosecutor's) stashhouse. Yup its the Prosecutor (McShane really was the smart one.) --- Harry presures the judge to pressure the prosecutor to investigate the Quota's.

Breanna found the Bagmans house. (turns out, cash money takes up a lot of space and only some houses built in the story-apropriate era have enough space between their walls. Add in his area of operation and it narrows down to 1) --- Harry Wilson, Law Criminal. Has a ring to it. (also the "con artist" line gets a 10/10)

[nicklloydnow]

“An investigation by The New York Times found that many of the troops sent to bombard the Islamic State in 2016 and 2017 returned to the United States plagued by nightmares, panic attacks, depression and, in a few cases, hallucinations. Once-reliable Marines turned unpredictable and strange. Some are now homeless. A striking number eventually died by suicide, or tried to.

Interviews with more than 40 gun-crew veterans and their families in 16 states found that the military repeatedly struggled to determine what was wrong after the troops returned from Syria and Iraq.

All the gun crews filled out questionnaires to screen for post-traumatic stress disorder, and took tests to detect signs of traumatic brain injuries from enemy explosions. But the crews had been miles away from the front lines when they fired their long-range cannons, and most never saw direct fighting or suffered the kinds of combat injuries that the tests were designed to look for.

A few gun-crew members were eventually given diagnoses of P.T.S.D., but to the crews that didn’t make much sense. They hadn’t, in most cases, even seen the enemy.

The only thing remarkable about their deployments was the sheer number of artillery rounds they had fired.

(…)

But it meant that a small number of troops had to fire tens of thousands of high-explosive shells — far more rounds per crew member, experts say, than any American artillery battery had fired at least since the Vietnam War.

Military guidelines say that firing all those rounds is safe. What happened to the crews suggests that those guidelines were wrong.

The cannon blasts were strong enough to hurl a 100-pound round 15 miles, and each unleashed a shock wave that shot through the crew members’ bodies, vibrating bone, punching lungs and hearts, and whipping at cruise-missile speeds through the most delicate organ of all, the brain.

More than a year after Marines started experiencing problems, the Marine Corps leadership tried to piece together what was happening by ordering a study of one of the hardest-hit units, Fox Battery, 2nd Battalion, 10th Marines.

The research was limited to reviewing the troops’ medical records. No Marines were examined or interviewed. Even so, the report, published in 2019, made a startling finding: The gun crews were being hurt by their own weapons.

More than half the Marines in the battery had eventually received diagnoses of traumatic brain injuries, according to a briefing prepared for Marine Corps headquarters. The report warned that the experience in Syria showed that firing a high number of rounds, day after day, could incapacitate crews “faster than combat replacements can be trained to replace them.”

The military did not seem to be taking the threat seriously, the briefing cautioned: Safety training — both for gun crews and medical personnel — was so deficient, it said, that the risks of repeated blast exposure “are seemingly ignored.”

Despite the concerns raised in the report, no one appears to have warned the commanders responsible for the gun crews. And no one told the hundreds of troops who had fired the rounds.

Instead, in case after case, the military treated the crews’ combat injuries as routine psychiatric disorders, if they treated them at all. Troops were told they had attention deficit disorder or depression. Many were given potent psychotropic drugs that made it hard to function and failed to provide much relief.

Others who started acting strangely after the deployments were simply dismissed as problems, punished for misconduct and forced out of the military in punitive ways that cut them off from the veterans’ health care benefits that they now desperately need.

(…)

Firing weapons is as fundamental to military service as tackling is to football. And research has started to reveal that, as with hits in football, repeated blast exposure from firing heavy weapons like cannons, mortars, shoulder-fired rockets and even large-caliber machine guns may cause irreparable injury to the brain. It is a sprawling problem that the military is just starting to come to grips with.

The science is still in its infancy, but evidence suggests that while individual blasts rippling through brain tissue may not cause obvious, lasting injury, repeated exposure appears to create scarring that eventually could cause neural connections to fail, according to Gary Kamimori, a senior Army blast researcher who retired recently after a career studying the problem.

“Think of it like a rubber band,��� he said. “Stretch a rubber band a hundred times and it bounces back, but there are micro tears forming. The hundred-and-first time, it breaks.”

Those blasts might never cause a person to see stars or experience other signs of concussion, but over time they may lead to sleeplessness, depression, anxiety and other symptoms that in many ways resemble P.T.S.D., according to Dr. Daniel Perl, a neuropathologist who runs a Defense Department tissue bank that preserves dead veterans’ brains for research.

“It’s common to mistake a blast injury in the brain for something else, because when you walk into a clinic, it looks like a lot of other things,” Dr. Perl said.

His lab has examined samples from hundreds of deceased veterans who were exposed to enemy explosions and blasts from firing weapons during their military careers. The researchers found a unique and consistent pattern of microscopic scarring.

Finding that pattern in living veterans is another matter. There is currently no brain scan or blood test that can detect the minute injuries, Dr. Perl said; the damage can be seen only under microscopes once a service member has died. So there is no definitive way to tell whether a living person is injured. Even if there were, there is no therapy to fix it.

The lab hasn’t examined any brains from artillery units sent to fight the Islamic State, but Dr. Perl said that he would not be surprised if many of them were affected. “You have a blast wave traveling at the speed of sound through the most complex and intricate organ in the body,” he said. “Wouldn’t you think there would be some damage?”

The military for generations set maximum safe blast-exposure levels for eardrums and lungs, but never for brains. Anything that didn’t leave troops dazed was generally considered safe. But that has recently changed.

Over the last decade, veterans suffering from brain injury-like symptoms after years of firing weapons pressured Congress to rethink the potential dangers, and lawmakers passed a number of bills from 2018 to 2022 ordering the Pentagon to start a sprawling “Warfighter Brain Health Initiative” to try to measure blast exposure and develop protocols to protect troops.

(…)

In response to questions from The Times, both the Army and Marine Corps acknowledged that some gun crew members were injured by blasts during the fight against the Islamic State. In part because of that experience, the branches say they now have programs to track and limit crews’ exposure.

But a Marine officer currently in charge of an artillery battery questioned whether that was accurate. He said recently that he has never seen or heard of the new safety guidelines, and that nothing was being done to document his troops’ blast exposure.

The officer, who asked that his name not be used because he was not authorized to speak publicly, said he was experiencing splitting headaches and small seizures, but was worried that his injuries would not be acknowledged because there was no documentation that he was ever exposed to anything dangerous.

In short, he said, there is little in military regulations now that might stop what happened to the artillery troops in Syria and Iraq from happening again.

(…)

Night and day they hurled rounds, using some of the military’s most sophisticated cannons, M777A2 howitzers. The 35-foot-long guns had modern, precisely designed titanium parts and a digital targeting system, but when it came to protecting the crew the design had changed little in a century. Gun crews still worked within arm’s reach of the barrel and fired the gun by pulling a simple cord.

The resulting blast was several times louder than a jet taking off, and unleashed a shock wave that hit the crews like a kick to the chest. Ears rang, bones shivered, vision blurred as eyeballs momentarily compressed, and a ripple shot through every neuron in the brain like a whipcrack.

“You feel it in your core, you feel it in your teeth,” said Carson Brown, a corporal from Idaho who pulled the firing cord for hundreds of shots. “It’s like it takes a year off your life.”

(…)

The demands of Task Force 9 led to rates of artillery fire not seen in generations.

During Operation Desert Storm in 1991, artillery crews fired an average of 70 rounds during the entire six-week campaign, said John Grenier, a historian at the Army’s Field Artillery School. During the initial months of the invasion of Iraq in 2003, crews fired an average of 260 rounds. In Syria, each gun in Alpha battery shot more than 1,100 rounds in two months — most of them using high-powered charges that produce the strongest shock waves. Some guns in Fox battery, which replaced Alpha, fired about 10,000 rounds each.

“It’s shocking, insane,” Mr. Grenier said.

Under the relentless tempo, Marines would wake up feeling hung over and stagger to the guns like zombies. Their sense of taste changed. Some threw up. Crews grew irritable and fights broke out.

The symptoms were telltale signs of concussion, but also what anyone might feel after a string of stressful 20-hour workdays in the desert, sleeping in foxholes and eating rations from plastic pouches. Medics came around daily to check on the crews but never intervened. And Marines trained to endure didn’t complain.

(…)

Traumatic brain injuries can have profound effects on parts of the body that are nowhere near the skull, because the damage can cause communication with other organs to malfunction. Dozens of the young veterans interviewed by The Times said they now had elevated, irregular heartbeats and persistent, painful problems with their digestion.

(…)

All four of the artillery batteries examined by The Times have had at least one suicide — a striking pattern, since death by suicide is rare even in high-risk populations. Some batteries have had several, and many service members said in interviews that they had tried to kill themselves.

(…)

The Defense Department has spent more than a billion dollars in the last decade to research traumatic brain injury, but it still knows very little about what might have happened to the artillery crews. Nearly all of the research has focused on big explosions from roadside bombs and other enemy attacks, not the blast waves from the routine firing of weapons.

Still, as that research progressed and studies tried to define the threshold at which an explosion caused brain damage, a growing amount of data suggested that the level was much lower than expected — so low, in fact, that it wasn’t much different from what troops experienced when they pulled the cord on an artillery cannon.

(…)

Under an electron microscope, a ravaged neural landscape came into focus. Sheaths of myelin, vital for insulating the biological wiring of the brain, hung in tatters. In key parts of the brain that control emotion and executive function, large numbers of mitochondria — the tiny powerhouses that provide energy for each cell — were dead.

“It was remarkable — the damage was very widespread,” Dr. Gu said. “And that was just from one explosion.”

Of course, the brains of mice and humans are very different. Dr. Scott Cota, a Navy captain and brain injury expert, said it was unclear whether the same damage would occur in human brains. Researchers can’t expose humans to damaging blasts, and then dissect them the way they can mice, he said. And techniques are not yet available to detect microscopic trauma in living brains.

“It’s very hard to study,” Dr. Cota said. “And unfortunately, we can only do it post-mortem at this point.”

The artillery gun crews present a rare and valuable chance to understand how blasts affect the brain, but no researchers are tracking them. It’s not clear if anyone in a position to learn from them is even aware that this unique group of combat veterans exists.

Most of the crew members have drifted out of the military to corners of the country where they continue to quietly grapple with headaches, depression and confusion that they don’t understand.”

[amanita-muscaria-lover]

I think this is the perfect time to talk about how horrible (american) football is and how early so many players die.

[biracy]

[ID: Two screenshots of Wikipedia articles.

First: "According to 2017 study on brains of deceased gridiron football players, 99% of tested brains of NFL players, 88% of CFL players, 64% of semi-professional players, 91% of college football players, and 21% of high school football players had various stages of CTE. Players still alive are not able to be tested."

Second: "Two former NFL Man of the Wear winners suffering from CTE symptoms shot themselves in the chest so their brains could be studied for the damage inflicted by football."

End ID]

man how the hell is this stupid ass sport legal. why do we funnel HIGH SCHOOLERS into this

[rabiesbites]

why is football still even legal.

[t-jfh]

Knock-on effect

ABC News

For competitive gymnast Josh, two heavy falls during training were enough to set his ambitions off course.

With a growing focus on the impacts of concussion in elite sport, experts say more work is needed to protect young people.

Rugby League legend Wally Lewis diagnosed with probable CTE.

ABC News

What is CTE? Here's what we know about chronic traumatic encephalopathy

ABC News

Hawthorn ruckman Max Lynch forced to retire over concussion fears, as Port faces more scrutiny over protocols.

ABC News

[niamhuncensored]

This isn't exactly what's being discussed here but I believe it's relevant.

they need to stop this NFL season now i am not joking or being facetious they need to reevaluate how football is played fundamentally and it should have happened after Tua earlier this season

[inaweofmytism]

On the one hand reading this page about CTE has me feeling the exact same joy and relief of finding out about autism but on the other hand the line “There is no cure for CTE” at the end hit me in the chest like a truck.

[straykatfish]

Women victims of domestic violence: a series of pastel paintings

A3 pastel paintings made as part of a series about the effects of repeated concussions (CTE – chronic traumatic encephalopathy) on brain function. Recognised in sports such as rugby and football where concussion time-out is now mandatory, reluctantly in boxing, and barely at all in women victims of domestic violence who have no time-out and no referees to intervene. I’m making print rights to…

[puck-luck]

trevor zegras smut with choking bc i need his tattooed arm around my throat

note: my friend Mo told me that sexual choking can lead to chronic traumatic encephalopathy (cte) according to the New York Times & to be quite honest? if having trevor's hand around my neck ends with me having cte... i won't be... too upset. i would hate to end up like c**** b***** though. what a horrible result of a traumatic brain injury.

Trevor's arm veins pop when he wraps his fingers around your neck and squeezes, just enough that you gasp and tilt your head back so he can get a better grip on our throat.

"Fucking whore," Trevor spits out. "Getting turned on from my hand around my throat– fuck, you want me to take your breath away, yeah, baby? You want me to be in control so bad, you trust me so much that you'll let me wrap my hand around your pretty neck and cut you off, huh?"

You whimper and grasp at his wrist, just holding him. You trace his tattoos, feeling over the skin. Your eyes prickle with tears and you take in a huge breath when Trevor lets up.

"Okay?" Trevor checks, reaching up to wipe the tears from the corners of your eyes.

"Again, please," you ask, eyes wide. You bring Trevor's hand back to your neck and he smirks before closing his fingers around it.

Everything is heightened– the kiss of Trevor's cock against your walls as he thrusts into you with reckless abandon, the twitch of his fingers as he squeezes and loosens his grip every fifteen or so seconds (not that you're keeping track), and his deep, dark stare into your eyes as he uses you to chase his own pleasure.

[mariacallous]

Content warning: This story includes references to death by suicide.

Evan Hansen was born to play football. A strong, rambunctious kid, he started playing sports year-round as early as he could. “He was very selfless, always willing to sacrifice himself for the betterment of the team,” says his father, Chuck Hansen. As a fearless linebacker at Wabash College in Indiana, the young player made 209 tackles in his first three seasons, and was hit far more than that during games and practices. Two days after winning the second game of his senior year, Evan died by suicide.

Searching for an explanation, Chuck Hansen pored through his son’s internet search history. One query popped out: “CTE.”

CTE stands for chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a neurodegenerative brain disease that causes symptoms like memory loss, depression, and emotional dysregulation. Since 2005, it has been linked to head trauma and to contact sports like football, where brains can get knocked around during tackles and collisions. In 2016, the National Football League acknowledged that the sport was linked to CTE after many retired players were diagnosed posthumously by researchers at the Boston University CTE Center.

Given the NFL-centered media coverage throughout the mid-aughts, “people have this impression that CTE is a disease of former NFL players,” says Julie Stamm, a clinical assistant professor of kinesiology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “But it’s not just a disease for professional athletes.”

Yet until recently, few studies focused on athletes like Evan, who never played professionally and died before developing age-related brain changes. (In older players, it can be challenging to separate signs of CTE from other kinds of neurodegeneration.) The Hansen family knew that Evan had only been diagnosed with one concussion in his 14 years of football—none since starting college. And although they knew that he’d had trouble doing schoolwork and experienced a bout of depression his junior year, his mental health seemed to have stabilized with therapy and medication.

While Evan’s search history suggests he suspected that these issues were signs of CTE, the disease can’t be diagnosed without examining the brain posthumously. So, like many other families seeking answers for unexplained changes in their loved ones’ behavior, the Hansens donated Evan’s brain to the Understanding Neurologic Injury and Traumatic Encephalopathy (UNITE) Brain Bank, run by the Boston University CTE Center.

Ann McKee, the center’s director, chose 152 of them to study. All were contact sports athletes who died under the age of 30, many by suicide or unintentional drug overdose. And as McKee’s team reported in August in JAMA Neurology, 41 percent of them already had CTE. One of them was Evan. Like him, of those diagnosed, most had only played sports at a high school or college level.

This study reveals that young, amateur athletes aren’t spared from the brain damage that comes with contact sports, even if they quit before going pro. And studying early-stage CTE in young, otherwise healthy brains, McKee says, “may give us clues as to how the disease is triggered.” To her, the takeaway is clear: “We need to reduce the number and the strength of head impacts in contact sports. If we don’t, we’re going to face consequences like this.”

McKee, who is also the director of neuropathology for Veterans Affairs Boston, began studying the brains of former NFL players 15 years ago. She couldn’t believe what she saw: big lesions in the crevices of the brain, dotted with abnormal protein clusters. A huge Packers fan, McKee has watched a lot of football games. But, she recalls, until then, “it never occurred to me that they were damaging their brains, because you don’t see it on the field. They’ve got the helmets. They look invincible.”

Researchers now know more about what is happening to the brain beneath the helmet. The jostling of the brain tugs at neural tissue, placing cells and blood vessels under stress. Tau proteins, which stabilize the scaffolding that gives neurons their structure, fall off when a cell is stressed. These fallen proteins pile up inside the cell, “a sort of toxic clump,” as McKee describes it. Eventually, the pileup overwhelms and kills the cell, leaving neurofibrillary tangles, which appear as ominous dark smears under a microscope. These tangles, which also appear in Alzheimer’s disease, make it harder for neurons to communicate with each other, causing memory problems.

Meanwhile, injured blood vessels compromise the sacred blood-brain barrier that normally protects sensitive neural tissue from irritating molecules flowing through the rest of the body. The resulting irritation causes inflammation, which induces more tau clumping, initiating a downward spiral of neurodegeneration.

To screen the donated young athletes’ brains for CTE, the researchers looked for tau, as well as signs of larger-scale problems like inflammation, hardening or deterioration of blood vessels, and changes to white matter, which contains the connections between neurons. They also interviewed the donors’ loved ones to learn more about their behavior and cognitive symptoms while they were alive. All of them had experienced issues like memory loss, depression, and impulsive behavior.

Of the 152 brains examined, 63 were posthumously diagnosed with CTE. The vast majority were still in early stages of neurodegeneration, but three of them—one belonging to a former NFL player, one to a college football player, and one to a professional rugby player—had reached the third of CTE’s four stages. Notably, another brain with CTE belonged to a 28-year-old women’s collegiate soccer player—the first case of its kind.

The youth of these players also allowed the research team to rule out aging as the cause of the damage. Aging, as well as high blood pressure, cardiac disease, and other neurodegenerative problems, can all damage brain tissue. But in the sample used for the new study, all of the athletes died between the ages of 13 and 29. “These are pristine, beautiful brains,” McKee says.

The fact that so many of the donors’ families had noticed mood and memory changes—regardless of whether their child was ultimately diagnosed with CTE—might be an artifact of the study’s sample pool. Families were simply more likely to donate to the brain bank if they had noticed unusual behavior in their child. But McKee says this also suggests that some of the symptoms experienced by these young athletes are not always caused by CTE, but may still reflect the aftermath of head trauma. Chris Nowinski, a study coauthor and CEO of the nonprofit Concussion Legacy Foundation, remembers struggling with chronic symptoms after the concussion that ended his pro wrestling career in his twenties. In cases like his, concussion-related problems like sleep impairments, or the difficulties of coming to terms with life as an injured or retired athlete, are likely the root cause of the mental health issues—not necessarily tau pathology.

The new study’s results build upon a mountain of evidence connecting contact sports to CTE. One 2017 study of 202 deceased football players found that 87 percent had CTE, including 110 of the 111 brains belonging to retired NFL players. Other studies revealed that CTE is more prevalent in athletes than non-athletes, and is specifically tied to experience playing contact sports, not one-off traumatic brain injuries. Ongoing studies are developing ways to diagnose CTE while people are alive, in the hopes of finding ways to intervene while the disease is still in its earliest stages.

A common misconception is that a one-time impact can lead to neurodegeneration. The real problem is getting hit in the head over and over, for years and years. “A tennis player who had five concussions is not going to get CTE,” says Nowinski. “There’s something about getting hundreds or thousands of head impacts a year. That’s what triggers it, whether you have concussion symptoms or not.”

Like many kids in the United States, Evan Hansen started playing tackle football in third grade. “He was in his 14th year of football, a senior in college, when he died,” says his dad. The number of years he played, and the age he was when he started facing regular blows to the head, likely contributed to developing CTE, according to McKee’s findings. When he signed his son up for football, Hansen recalls, “It was just pure ignorance. I didn’t know what I didn’t know.”

While his son’s diagnosis wasn’t made until after his death, Chuck Hansen suspects that Evan’s fear of the disorder, and what it meant for his future, weighed on him heavily. “I believe that he thought he had CTE, and had never talked about it,” Hansen says. “Maybe he thought it was a terminal thing that would only get worse, and that there was no hope.”

While there is no medical treatment for CTE yet, McKee and Nowinski recommend that young athletes focus on seeking treatment for individual mental health symptoms, like insomnia or depression. The Concussion Legacy Foundation runs a HelpLine for those who are struggling with post-concussion symptoms, or who are worried about CTE. The Hansen family also started a foundation to promote mental health awareness and CTE research, and to fund scholarships for medical students.

But CTE is preventable. Small changes to practice drills and gameplay could make a huge difference for young athletes, says Nowinski. The playbook for prevention is simple: Reduce the number of hits to the head, and reduce the strength of those hits. Most happen during practice, so by reducing the number of drills involving head impacts and choosing ones that are less likely to cause high-magnitude blows, coaches can spare their players unnecessary danger. “You can’t get rid of CTE in tackling sports,” adds Nowinski, “but you can get rid of most cases of CTE.”

Reducing the length of each game and the number of games per season can minimize the likelihood of head injuries, and banning brain-jostling events, like fighting in hockey or heading in soccer, can make games safer, he continues. Perhaps most importantly, youth sports leagues can raise the age at which kids are first exposed to preventable head impacts. “With tackle football before 14, the risks are not worth the benefits,” Nowinski says. “You don’t become a better football player from playing young.” In one case study reported by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, transitioning from tackle to flag football would reduce a young athlete’s median number of head impacts per season from 378 to eight.

But, Nowinski points out, there is no central governing body in charge of youth sports leagues, leaving it largely up to individual coaches to make changes to their practice drills and recruitment strategies. “The opportunity is right in front of our faces,” says Nowinski. “I remember being told how much football makes you a leader. But right now, on this issue, there’s a black hole of leadership.”

McKee doesn’t think that parents should take their kids out of sports—far from it. “We just need to change the rules and our thinking about these games, so that CTE isn’t a consequence of playing contact sports,” McKee says.

And for young athletes concerned about CTE, she urges them to seek help for mental health symptoms, build personal support systems, and keep moving forward with their lives. “Individuals like Evan need to be seen, because in all likelihood, we can treat their symptoms and help them feel less hopeless,” she says. “It’s not a time to despair. It’s a time to come in, be evaluated, and be treated.”

If you or someone you know needs help, call 1-800-273-8255 for free, 24-hour support from the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline. You can also text HOME to 741-741 for the Crisis Text Line. Outside the US, visit the International Association for Suicide Prevention for crisis centers around the world.

[jeannereames]

What do you think about the theory Alexander died of sepsis caused by pancreatitis?

The Problem with Diagnosing Alexander's Death

I think it's Yet Another Hot Medical Theory fad.

As I've said before, there are loads of historiographic problems with attempting to "diagnose" ancient illnesses, especially when it comes to important figures, as MORAL lessons often trumped reality.

Herod was supposedly eaten by worms, struck down by an angel of the Lord (Acts 12). Folks, he did not die from some abdominal parasite. Being "eaten by worms" was SYMBOLIC of his perceived moral failings. Sulla supposedly died of similar (Plutarch, Sulla, 36).

Ya gotta be really careful of ancient accounts of people's symptoms. (That's one reason I'm skeptical of Plutarch's account of Hephaistion's death. He was a bit too inclined to moralize about it.)

I AM inclined to think Alexander died of some sort of fever disease, as those were extremely common. Maybe typhoid with complications, maybe malaria. But let's not get too complicated or faddish about it, based on whatever is in vogue in modern pop culture. I've also seen arguments that he died of Guillain-Barré syndrome, and of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE). The latter, particularly, struck me as "hip" and unconvincing with a very poor grasp of historiographic issues. The pancreatitis theory seems designed to fit around his supposed alcoholism, which I've addressed elsewhere on TikTok.

[gwydionmisha]

This doesn't surprise me even a little, given my Uncle's experiences.