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NFL football next to illustration of a brain injury
Football is a brutal sport, and the long-term health risks of playing in the NFL are very well-documented at this point. However, a new study has shown just how dangerous it can be after highlighting an alarming number of potential cases of CTE in the brains of former players who’ve passed away.
There have been concerns about player safety in football for well over a century. In 1905, Teddy Roosevelt held a summit at the White House to urge leaders at the college level to get their act together in the middle of a season in which 18 players died due to injuries they sustained on the gridiron.
The sport has come a long way since then as rules and equipment have evolved, but injuries tend to be a matter of “when” as opposed to “if” for virtually every single player who steps onto the field. That includes those that can be difficult to diagnose at first glance, including instances of brain trauma, which has emerged as a very hot topic of conversation over the past few decades.
It took the NFL much longer than it probably should have to admit concussions were a problem, as the league spent years suppressing evidence of the short- and long-term repercussions of that particular setback.
That includes chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), the ailment linked to repeated head trauma that has impacted the lives of countless people who played football at a competitive level.
There have been a number of studies that have set out to determine how many guys who played in the NFL end up developing it, and a new one is one of the most worrying ones to date.
A new study estimates 75% of former NFL players who died between 2008 and 2023 had CTE
Football is one of a number of contact sports where participants develop CTE at a disproportionate rate compared to the general population. It has the potential to trigger mood swings and violent and unpredictable behavior, and it also manifests in physical symptoms like headaches and dizziness while progressing into dementia.
There is currently no way to treat the disease, nor is it possible to diagnose a person until after they’ve died. As a result, hundreds of football players have donated their brains to science in the hopes of aiding researchers who have attempted to pin down just how widespread the issue is.
The number has been harder to pin down than you might think. In 2023, the CTE Center at Boston University revealed it was prevalent in the brains of 345 of the 372 ex-NFL players it examined (91.7%), while another study released earlier this year involving 878 former players who died between 2016 said it was “at least 25%” while acknowledging it might be higher.
That sure seems to be the case based on the newest numbers released by researchers at BU, which expanded the sample size to 2,362 cases (consisting of 396 NFL players who donated their brains and 1,966 who did not).
The study aimed to tackle the bias of the samples the center has obtained, as players who believe they were suffering from CTE before their death are more likely to donate their brains. After crunching the numbers, they estimated that 74.5% of players who passed away between 2008 and 2023 had the disease (pegging the lowest possibility at 63.7%).
The majority of the players at the center of the study were 70 or older when they died, meaning most of them played before the league began to address its head trauma issue. You can only hope the numbers will get lower now that it has, but it’s still a sobering reminder of the toll the game takes.