New study finds CTE in 3 out of 4 deceased football players

Welcome back to Good Day Chicago. We want to slow the show down and talk about something really important. Three out of four football players who died in a 15-year span had CTE. That's what a new study in the journal JAMA Network Open suggests. I mean, that is startling. Three out of four. CTE, or chronic traumatic encephalopathy, is a brain disease linked to repeated head injuries. It kills the brain's nerve cells, and then it gets worse over time. The only way to diagnose it is after death. But they're working on that. Joining us now is one of the researchers on the study, Dr. Yorgos Tripodos with Boston University's CTE Center. Doctor, thanks for being here. Thank you for the invitation. Were you startled at the findings of this study or did you suspect that that many football players had suffered from this all along? Well, I've been working in this area for the last 15 years and we have seen numerous studies that show that the number of blows to the head are related to the risk of CTE. I shouldn't have been surprised, but honestly, I was surprised by the astounding number that three out of four former NFL players who died during that period had CTE in the brain. Talk about the fact that you can only confirm CTE after death. Talk about the issues with that based on your research. So in order to diagnose the CTE or any disease, what we need is a reliable way to differentiate from other neuropathologies such as Alzheimer's disease. So what we need is a reliable biomarker, preferably a blood biomarker, that will help us identify the disease among the living players. We're making significant progress, And I believe in the next few months we'll be able to have a diagnosis for the disease. Prevention is obviously key. So what do you think needs to be done and what has the NFL already done? So we know that CTE is really a rare disease among those who are not exposed to repetitive head impacts. In community brain banks, we see CTE in less than 1%. And the fact that we see it among those who played the longest, the former NFL players, at the level of 75% is another level of evidence that the more blows the head, the higher the risk. We have seen that every year of Increases the risk of CTE by 30%. So what we need to do to prevent, and CTE is a very preventable disease, is to reduce the number of blows to the head. And there are some things that we can do. In football, we can reduce the number of blows. If we have flag football before high school, no tackle football before high school, and reduce the number of blows during practice. That's what the NFL is doing. In most cases, they do not have blows to the head during practice. We'd like to see that across all levels, college, high school. Doctor, more recently, this NFL season, we saw what's called the guardian cap. And a lot of people were kind of making fun of it because it looks a little odd compared to the traditional helmet that we're used to. But apparently, it has so much cushion that it sustains blows differently. Do you think something like that helps? There have been lots of technological advancements that protect the skull, but none of these advancements really protect the brain inside the skull. It doesn't protect from the rotational movement that our brain sustains when it hits, when it hits in the skull. So these are really great things for protecting your skull but they're not Doing anything for reducing the risk of the disease Interesting. Okay. So, you know, outside of football players, is the average person at risk for CTE and how could they be? So we don't know what is the risk of the disease among living players. We need to arrive to that number, we'll need a diagnosis. We also do not know what is the prevalence of the disease even among the deceased players in college and high school. We need other studies to establish this number. We're working on this, but we also have seen CTE, chronic traumatic encephalopathy, in other sports, ice hockey, soccer. Rugby and among veterans who had blast exposure during combat. Are there usually signs, I know your research is dealing with the aftermath, right? Where you already know that essentially you're finding out somebody has CTE because they're not here with us. But are there signs leading up to it, like when you're alive and well, are there things that start to happen within the body that kind lean towards a diagnosis of potentially CTE? So even in our brain bank, we go back to the families that donate the brain and we have interviews with them to try to establish the age of onset of symptoms. So what we know is that CTE is related to dementia. CTE is a cause of dementia. So not everybody with CTE will have symptoms. So the 75% doesn't mean that everybody will have symptoms. Even if they have symptoms, it doesn't mean that they will have symptoms, severe symptoms, till later in their lives. But we know that former NFL players have four times the risk of dementia compared to the general population. And four times really a very, very large number. Remember, there is no other occupational or environmental hazard That is linked with such a high risk of dementia ever studied. My goodness. Interesting. Well, thanks so much. I've got a little boy who's probably gonna grow up to play football. He's a big kid. So I hope that more is done within the next 16 years. Thank you, doctor. Thank you.