https://www.thestar.com/sports/footb...clear-cox.html
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Another perspective: https://sports.yahoo.com/im-brain-sc...135727314.html
But has Cox ever said anything about hockey? How many players did Scott Stevens hammer in the head over the years while being considered a good clean player? I'm obviously no scientist, but I can't he'll but wonder if CTE is purely the result of playing a heavy contact sport. Do alcohol and drugs play a factor? I was told a very long time ago that alcohol kills brain cells. I'm sure steroids don't help either. I look at George Chuvalo, who took so many shots to the head from the best heavyweight boxers of all time, now in his 80's and functioning greatly, and I can't help but wonder about this.
You are correct Angelo, it is a contact sport issue.Quote:
Originally Posted by AngeloV
I have been an on ice official for 35 years and have seen many violent collisions during games.
As eluded to by many today's athletes (in all contact sports) are bigger, faster and in much better physical condition to which the collisions carry greater forces.
Another factor is the equipment (hockey specifically) is much more substantial than in the past, elbow pads are like iron compared to what I wore when I played and can be used as a weapon.
Arriving at the statistical truth of this issue (if we aren't there yet, as argued rather well in the ArgoGabe22 citation) is not an intractable problem. Quick and dirty (for NFL-only study): for a 95% confidence level with a 4% confidence interval, I calculate that a sample size of ~ 400 would provide sufficient statistical power.
I don't think this is a counter-intuitive subject of study. At the end of the day, while this type of brain trauma may be caused by other activities, playing football, hockey, or boxing is a highly-effective danger to athletes' brain health. So, today we're in a quandary, e.g., boxing is my favourite sport.
I agree football is being more critically examined than other sports but when Dr. Bennett Omalu, whose research discovered CTE, is now saying that having children playing contact sports is child abuse and focuses in his discussion mostly on football (although he mentions hockey, boxing, wrestling, mixed martial arts, and rugby but not soccer's heading) in the video below, this puts football in the hot seat. The video includes former NFLer Jack Brewer thanking Omalu for his research. Youth football has been declining in numbers for a decade and this will only accelerate the process.
http://www.foxbusiness.com/features/...on-doctor.html
The media coverage just two days ago of the release of the brain scan of Aaron Hernandez that his 27 year old brain had CTE symptoms similar to those of retired players well into their 60s increases the pressure on football even more.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/21/s...n.html?mcubz=3Quote:
Aaron Hernandez, the former New England Patriots tight end and a convicted murderer, was 27 when he committed suicide in April. Yet a posthumous examination of his brain showed he had such a severe form of the degenerative brain disease C.T.E. that the damage was akin to that of players well into their 60s.
1) Are the lawyers just using that to make him seem like he's less of a bad person? Hernandez has been up to no good for a long time. Not sure if it's the "CTE" or the lifestyle he had chosen.Quote:
Originally Posted by jerrym
2) Issue I have is that football is so easily targeted but what about other things that may have a huge affect on a child's development (aka "abuse") like cellphone use, social media, smoking pot, etc. Football isn't JUST the problem.
All contact sports are going to face scrutiny in the coming years. Even soccer will come under pressure to eliminate headers, IMO. Football is just the thin edge of the wedge. I've said before and I'll repeat, I believe the NFL (and by extension the CFL and college football) is heading towards an existential crisis within the next 10 years. And I continue to believe that for football to survive, it's going to have to become either touch or flag, without anything resembling traditional line play.
Scott Stinson has a good article entitled "CTE discovered in Hernandez poses more questions" that we do not have all the answers to this yet. However, the evidence that there is a very strong correlation between contact sports and CTE is not in dispute.Quote:
Originally Posted by ArgoGabe22
Many parents will not wait until final answers arrive.
I didn't when it comes to hockey. My then eleven year old son in 2004 was playing minor hockey when it was announced that next year Hockey Canada would allow hitting from 11 up the next year. The three members of Hockey Canada's safety committee then resigned in protest, including a doctor who had been on the committee for 25 years because studies showed that checking in hockey would greatly increase injuries below 14.
The head of the Toronto minor hockey association had commissioned a study to counter this extensive research. (Hockey Canada gets a large amount of its money from the NHL that wants players used to hitting.) His study purported to show that there was no difference in injuries between a trial hitting and non-hilting leagues. However, when CBC hired another statistician to examine these results he concluded the study showed the exact opposite. When the researcher who did the study was confronted with his own statistics stating the opposite of his conclusions by CBC, he had to admit his conclusions were wrong. Even then, Hockey Canada went ahead with introducing hitting, saying they had a study that demonstrated hitting was safe (even though that had been disproved). That was enough for me. I switched my son to competitive swimming. I now don't trust governing sports bodies to look after the welfare of athletes at any level. Unless contact sports starting confronting these issues with the welfare of players as their first priority, more and more parents will look to alternative options.
http://www.torontosun.com/2017/09/22...tanding-of-cteQuote:
But if the specifics of the Hernandez case are unusual, they are only so by a matter of degrees. His arc — football player dies, has brain examined, is found to have signs of CTE — is utterly familiar. Many families of former players have observed behavioural changes, mental suffering that can lead to suicide, which are then explained, somewhat, by the CTE that is discovered post-mortem.
Hernandez’s lawyers will now attempt to do something unique, which is blame murderous behaviour on the damage caused by football, but it’s of a piece with the blame placed on the sport by the families of dozens of former players who only ended up harming themselves. Hernandez, that is, follows a well-established pattern, even if his story is particularly chilling.
And yet, his experience is also a confounding one. He was finished football at the age of 23, having played three seasons and 38 games with New England. (He also played in 40 games at Florida.) A pass-catching tight end, he was not the kind of player who spent long stretches bashing into opponents in the sport’s trenches. There is no doubt that he would have taken blows to the head in his playing days, but because his career ended so early, Hernandez had simply not played that much football.
When the first discoveries of CTE in former football players were made, after the alarming post-career struggles of players like Mike Webster and Junior Seau, their brain damage was attributed to the years of repeated hits to their heads. Webster played in 245 NFL games over 16 years, Seau in 268 games over almost 20 years. That’s seven times as many games as Hernandez, and countless more hits.
What this means for the continuing study of football and CTE is unclear. The Hernandez case has quickly been interpreted by some as evidence that the proper amount of football that can be safely played is none at all. If someone at a relatively young age who has played relatively few games can have “severe” CTE, how could anyone be confident that they could play the game and avoid brain trauma?
But there’s another way to look at his case: Given his short career, is there another explanation for the damage to his brain other than football? Was it there all along, or is there something in his physiology that made him particularly susceptible to developing CTE?
The great unknown with the disease, because it can presently only be discovered in the brains of the dead, is whether it also lurks in the brains of the non-football-playing public. Are there people who are at elevated risk of the disease, people for whom contact sports would have a dramatic impact on their brain’s health in a short period of time? Was Hernandez one of them?
There aren’t going to be any satisfying answers to those questions, at least in this case. Hernandez’s lawyers have an obvious financial incentive to blame the ruin of his promising life on the sport he played, but the 2013 murder of Odin Lloyd was cold and calculated. The courts will spend years sorting that out.
In the meantime, there is the unavoidable fact that someone who didn’t play that much football had the brain of someone who played for a dozen years. We say every time another study is released that shows a shocking prevalence of CTE in former football players that it adds to the growing understanding of the disease. We wonder when young men will start deciding in large numbers that the risk from the sport is too great. Hernandez, ever the outlier, probably won’t change many minds.
But when someone with limited exposure to the game can still have such a damaged brain, it’s hard not to wonder if the safety measures being enacted, the non-contact practices and the independent concussion spotters and the like, aren’t just so much messing about in the margins. The pro leagues, when they aren’t defending themselves in court, spend a lot of time these days discussing ways to make football safe.
Every passing season, though, stories like this one make it feel more like an impossible pursuit.
Good point. Just saw George a little while ago on TV. I don't think anybody took more head shots than George Chuvalo.Quote:
Originally Posted by AngeloV
One person is not evidence, it's anecdote. For every Chuvalo who somehow didn't seem to suffer obvious brain damage, there are likely hundreds of ex-fighters who were ruined by getting punched repeatedly in the head.Quote:
Originally Posted by doubleblue
I never said it was 100% evidence. But I still would like to know if alcohol or drug use also is a contributing factor.Quote:
Originally Posted by paulwoods13