If previous news stories about CTE — or the Colin Kaepernick protests — hadn’t already convinced a lot of middle-class parents to keep their high-school-and-younger kids away from the gridiron, well… From the Washington Post:
Aaron Hernandez suffered the most severe case of chronic traumatic encephalopathy ever discovered in a person his age, damage that would have significantly affected his decision-making, judgment and cognition, researchers at Boston University revealed at a medical conference Thursday.
Ann McKee, the head of BU’s CTE Center, which has studied the disease caused by repetitive brain trauma for more than a decade, called Hernandez’s brain “one of the most significant contributions to our work” because of the brain’s pristine condition and the rare opportunity to study the disease in a 27-year-old.
Hernandez, a former New England Patriots tight end, hanged himself with a bedsheet in April in a Massachusetts prison while serving a life sentence for the murder of Odin Lloyd in 2013…
Because the center has received few brains from people Hernandez’s age, McKee could not say whether his brain was representative of a 27-year-old who had played as much football. But she found the advanced stage of CTE alarming.
“In this age group, he’s clearly at the severe end of the spectrum,” McKee said. “There is a concern that we’re seeing accelerated disease in young athletes. Whether or not that’s because they’re playing more aggressively or if they’re starting at younger ages, we don’t know. But we are seeing ravages of this disease, in this specific example, of a young person.”
At Thursday’s conference, McKee flipped through slides comparing sections of Hernandez’s brain with a sample without CTE. Hernandez’s brain had dark spots associated with tau protein and shrunken, withered areas, compared with immaculate white of the sample. His brain had significant damage to the frontal lobe, which impacts a person’s ability to make decisions and moderate behavior. As some new slides appeared on the projectors, some physicians and conference attendees gasped.
“We can’t take the pathology and explain the behavior,” McKee said. “But we can say collectively, in our collective experience, that individuals with CTE — and CTE of this severity — have difficulty with impulse control, decision-making, inhibition of impulses for aggression, emotional volatility, rage behaviors. We know that collectively.”
McKee said Hernandez had a genetic marker that makes people vulnerable to certain brain diseases and could have contributed to how aggressively he developed CTE.
“We know that that’s a risk factor for neurogenerative disease,” McKee said. “Whether or not that contributed in this case is speculative. It may explain some of his susceptibility to this disease.” …
More detail at the link. I suspect the sports-radio eugenics experts are gonna leap for that ‘genetic marker of vulnerability’ like a dog for a thrown frisbee, but I also get the feeling they aren’t the people with kids young enough to be Pee-Wee recruits, are they?
And if I were the NFL owners, I would give Hernandez’s fiancee Shayanna Jenkins-Hernandez whatever it took to make her happy, up to and including Bob Kraft’s less favorite testicle, because more publicity is absolutely the last thing they need right now. But then, I don’t claim to understand sports, especially football!
Sunday Sports Downer Open Thread: Aaron Hernandez, AgainPost + Comments (122)