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Seems to be a hot topic in many sports these days.
I personally think that in all PRO sports, the players who are participating and should understand the risk/reward.
If you engage in a physical sport, im perplexed how you could sue or blame the league.
I'm skeptical whether athletes now getting involved are just looking to cash in seeing what happened with the NFL settlement. Some notable NHL alumni have said they would not take part in the latest lawsuit. But don't get me wrong, there are many things that needs improvement within organizations like the NFL, NHL.
I wonder if PTSD will be the next big topic with lawsuits coming from ex-military, EMS etc. if it isn't already. I think that issue is a bit more serious than concussions in sports if you ask me.
I have to disagree ArgoGabe22. The release of NHL emails on concussions due to the class-action lawsuit by players shows not only that the NHL knew about the risk, it expected to be dealing with concussions virtually every night a large number of games were being played. Yet, their response was not to inform players of the risk or seek reduction of the risk, but to coverup the information.Quote:
Originally Posted by ArgoGabe22
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On one December night in 2011, Gary Bettman fired off an email to an NHL executive, asking for an update on that night's concussions.
Ten minutes later, Brendan Shanahan -- now president of the Toronto Maple Leafs -- reported back with some evidently good news: "Not so far," he wrote.
"Night is young!" the commish replied.
This week, those three words became the blinking neon sign which pointed the way behind the NHL's frozen curtain. On the other side lies a mountain of internal league communications, unsealed as part of an ongoing civil suit regarding the league's handling of concussions.
"Night is young" is not the most telling or objectionable of those exchanges, just among the most flippant. If everything was different, one could dismiss it as a bit of gallows humour that folks use to survive the pressure of most any business. Like layoff jokes to journalists, for instance.
But everything is not different. We are talking about a league that, like its more glistening big brother in football, has been sluggish to respond to damning research about the devastating impact of repeat concussions. In that light, it's hard to feel charitable about Bettman's quip: these are, after all, players' lives.
A resolute optimist might think that the league would prize those lives above all else, especially after the deaths of Rick Rypien, Wade Belak and Derek Boogard. But scouring the email trove, which The Globe and Mail posted in a searchable archive online, doesn't always show that.
Often, emails reveal league brass wringing their hands more over the NHL's brand, than emerging brain-injury science. In multiple communications, Bettman and his colleagues and acolytes bristle over unflattering questions, and issue warnings about how to handle public statements and investigations.
In 2009, TSN's Bob McKenzie sent an email to NHL general managers, asking them to complete an anonymous poll about fighting in hockey. Edmonton Oilers president Kevin Lowe forwarded the email to NHL VP Colin Campbell, recommending that GM's refrain from answering the poll.
"These types of polls could be dangerous, especially mid-season," Lowe wrote. "How would it look for the league if the GMs responded yes to taking fighting out of the game? What if the BOG's didn't feel the same way."
Campbell replied succinctly: "Agree."
What is more "dangerous" in this discussion: a league that fueled a vigorous public debate over concussions, or a league in which top brass knew at least that brain injuries from fighting could exacerbate mental illness, and chose to drag their feet on preventing it?
http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/sports/hockey/nhl/nhl-emails-pull-back-curtain-to-reveal-business-machine-374355151.html
http://www.ctvnews.ca/w5/lives-shatt...ries-1.2774366Quote:
"I'm 50 years old, I will die young," Peluso tells Westhead in an interview. ...
It seems like every year, somebody ends up dying because of what they've gone through playing hockey," says former NHLer Dan LaCouture.. ...
Mike Peluso says he is damaged goods. The 50-year-old former NHL enforcer, who played in the league from 1990 until 1998 with five NHL teams including the Chicago Blackhawks, Ottawa Senators and New Jersey Devils, says he has suffered eight grand mal seizures and has brain damage after playing in the NHL.
He holds the NHL responsible. He believes team doctors and trainers rushed him back onto the ice far too soon. ...Peluso is among more than 100 former NHL players who are suing the NHL, arguing that the league for decades has put profits ahead of player safety.
On one side, lawyers for the former NHL players, who also include Bernie Nichols, Joe Murphy, Gary Leeman and Craig Muni, allege the league has not taken seriously the health problems of its former players. They charge that the league’s high-profile working concussion group, headed by Dr. Ruben Echemendia of Penn State University, has been a whitewash. Even though this working group began its concussion study in 1997, it wasn’t until 2011 that the group published its findings.
Moreover, the former players allege, it wasn’t until 2013 that the NHL changed concussion protocols to require a concussed player not to return to the same game in which the concussion occurred.
A number of emails exchanged by NHL executivesincluding Commissioner Gary Bettman, deputy commissioner Bill Daly and NHL lawyer Julie Grand have already been released by the court and paint a picture of league officials seemingly as concerned about public relations benefits as they have been about player health and safety.
If the lawsuit ever makes it to trial, a jury will surely be asked to consider the following questions: What did NHL neurologists, doctors and medical trainers know about the dangers of repeated severe head injuries, and when did they know it?
Did team doctors put the financial interests of their employers ahead of the health concerns of players? And did NHL executives put their collective heads in the sand when it came to learning more about the dangers of repeated head trauma, and about possible rule changes that might have better protected players, even if it meant popular tough guys were sidelined longer between fights.
Yet in the NHL the players fought every attempt to make helmets mandatory for years.
The players want to take zero responsibility for playing a game that anyone knows was dangerous. And where is the player responsibility for the style of play where they head hunt and attempt to do damage to their NHLPA brothers? And how about the NHLPA's responsibility?
Nope. Just sue and get the public to blame everything on the teams. (ie: Lindros would sue the NHL but how about the player that gave him the head shot?)
Oh, and my pet peeve in the CFL is all the players who lead with their head .... to torpedo tackle a player by blasting them on the head. But we'll see all of them sue the CFL in future years for their self inflicted damage ... and expect others to pay for the damage they inflict.
And the fans? When the League attempts rules to limit such damages ... the fans cry that the game is being ruined.
Thank you for some much-needed common sense perspective.Quote:
Originally Posted by Ron
https://media.giphy.com/media/ENagATV1Gr9eg/giphy.gifQuote:
Originally Posted by Ron
A just released study concludes that 43% of retired NFLers suffer from signs of traumatic brain injuries. When leagues have tended to first deny or hide evidence of these problems, then raised doubts about the evidence, and used trainers or doctors who allow woozy, concussed players to continue in a game, they must live with the consequences. We do not say to miners or police or anyone else that knew that they were working in fields which were dangerous that they therefore have no right to compensation for injury or any right to sue where the case is adjudicated on the basis of evidence. If leagues do not start changing the way they deal with concussions, parents will ensure their is a mass exodus of their offspring from these sports in the next generation.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/...w-study-shows/Quote:
A study that will be presented at next week’s American Academy of Neurology (AAN) meeting offers one of the most conclusive pieces of evidence yet of a definitive link between brain injury and playing football.It shows that “more than 40 percent of retired National Football League players … had signs of traumatic brain injury based on sensitive MRI scans called diffusion tensor imaging,” according to a press release from the AAN. This isn’t the first study of its kind. Last year Frontline reported that researchers with the Department of Veterans Affairs and Boston University found chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), which the Mayo Clinic defines as “brain degeneration likely caused by repeated head traumas” that is “a diagnosis only made at autopsy,” in 96 percent of the NFL players they examined and in 79 percent of football players at various levels of play.
The researchers studied 165 deceased people who had played the sport in high school, college or professionally, and found evidence of CTE in 131 of them.
But this newest study is “one of the largest studies to date in living retired NFL players” and the “first to demonstrate significant objective evidence for traumatic brain injury in these former players,” study author Dr. Francis X. Conidi of the Florida Center for Headache and Sports Neurology and Florida State University College of Medicine said in the release.
“The rate of traumatic brain injury was significantly higher in the players than that found in the general population,” Conidi said in the release.
Heightened awareness of the connection between football and head traumas, the ongoing controversy over the NFL’s handling of the issue and a recent movie, “Concussion,” starring Will Smith, have led to speculation that tackle football as America knows it is doomed in the long run as parents become increasingly concerned about letting their children play. ...
To conduct the latest study, researchers took brain scans of 40 retired NFL players while giving them concentration and memory tests. The participants had played for an average of seven years and had reported an average of 8.1 concussions. Most were less than five years retired. Said the release: The study comes a few months after the NFL released its official 2015 injury report, which shows that instances of head trauma jumped by 32 percent from 2014 to 2015, rising from 206 to 271 reported concussions.
2015 saw the highest number of reported concussions in the past four years, as far back as the report disclosed.
Recently, NFL vice president for health and safety Jeff Miller publicly acknowledged the link between brain injury and football. Last month, The Post reported Miller told Rep. Janice Schakowsky (D-Ill.) at an event convened by a House committee that there was a proven correlation between football and brain injury. It was believed to be the first time that an NFL official acknowledged such a link between football and CTE. Afterwards, however, prominent NFL figures were far less definitive on the subject, reported The Post’s Mark Maske. At least two influential team owners, including the Dallas Cowboys’ Jerry Jones, said last month they were not certain about the relationship between football and brain diseases such as CTE. And at a news conference, Commissioner Roger Goodell did not directly answer a question about whether he and the league believe such a link exists. By acknowledging a link between football and CTE, legal experts say, the NFL could undermine its position in court, where a proposed settlement between the league and retired players is on appeal, and potentially create an open-ended liability with current and future players.
Below are some facts about concussions in sports based on research. As one would expect, football is the sport that produces the most concussions amongst males. However, for females it is soccer.
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- CDC estimates reveal that 1.6 million to 3.8 million concussions occur each year
- 5-10% of athletes will experience a concussion in any given sport season
- Fewer than 10% of sport related concussions involve a Loss of Consciousness (e.g., blacking out, seeing stars, etc.)
- Football is the most common sport with concussion risk for males (75% chance for concussion)
- Soccer is the most common sport with concussion risk for females (50% chance for concussion)
- 78% of concussions occur during games (as opposed to practices)
- Some studies suggest that females are twice as likely to sustain a concussion as males
- Headache (85%) and Dizziness (70-80%) are most commonly reported symptoms immediately following concussions for injured athletes
- Estimated 47% of athletes do not report feeling any symptoms after a concussive blow
- A professional football player will receive an estimated 900 to 1500 blows to the head during a season
- Impact speed of a professional boxers punch: 20mph
- Impact speed of a football player tackling a stationary player: 25mph
- Impact speed of a soccer ball being headed by a player: 70mph
http://www.concussiontreatment.com/c...cts.html#sfaq7
More evidence that concussions are a major problem in both football and hockey from the team neurologist of the Florida Panthers, Dr. Frank Conidi.
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Now chief of the Florida Centre for Headache and Sports Neurology, head of the Florida high school athletic concussion committee and team neurologist for the NHL’s Florida Panthers, Conidi was in Vancouver this week to present a paper adding more weight to the link between football and traumatic brain injury.But hockey, his first love, doesn’t get off the hook. Conidi suggests the NHL is suffering from a form of denial when it comes to TBI. “The NHL’s concussion committee doesn’t have a single neurologist on it,” he said in an interview with The Vancouver Sun. “Think about that. It (TBI) might be a problem in hockey as well.”
Although the NFL fought and tried to cover up the mounting evidence of chronic brain disease in modern football, the league now has protocols in place in which a concussed player must past muster from a team physician and two independent neurologists before being allowed to return to play.
What will it take for the NHL to respond the same way? “I don’t see every concussion with the Panthers,” Conidi admits. “Oftentimes, it’s the team doctor or the trainer who makes the athletes go back. That’s a little bit concerning for me. It’s going to change. They know it. We know it. The NFL was the first. Attorneys are going to start going after the NHL to make it change. It’s a matter of time.” He adds: “Hockey has the highest incidence of concussion per participant, at any level.
Look at the physics: force equals mass times acceleration. You’ve got higher mass now, higher acceleration in modern hockey. These guys are getting banged at a much higher rate.”
Based on an initial study of 40 NFL retired players (it has since grown to 80 to 100) Conidi added one of the strongest links yet between football and degenerative brain disease. He reported that 42.5 per cent of players in his study showed evidence of brain abnormalities. The median age was 35.85 years. Most had retired within the past five years. All were players who arrived at his door as patients, experiencing depression, anxiety, sleep disorders, attention problems, and deficits in executive function (54 per cent) and learning memory (45.9 per cent).
He used conventional neuro-imaging tools (MRI) as well as an advanced technique known as the Diffusion Tensor MRI (DTI), which maps the functioning of white matter, the wiring in the brain. Seventeen players (42.5 per cent) showed evidence of traumatic brain injury on the DTI. Twelve (30 per cent) showed signs of injury on the conventional MRI. ...
Interestingly, Conidi deduced that the number of concussions a player had was not necessarily linked to the extent of brain damage. Twelve (30 per cent) had experienced numerous sub-concussive hits, evidence that brain changes can occur even without the telltale signs of a concussion. “What we found is that the high-impact players — the bangers, offensive line, defensive line, running backs, those who took the repetitive hits — had the highest rate of imaging,” he said. “There was no correlation between having a positive MRI and the number of concussions.”
It’s a disturbing reality that the damage begins at the community football, high school and college level and accumulates over time. That conclusion means starting to limit full contact in practice — or banning it altogether — classifying football leagues into weight and size categories, as in wrestling, or introducing players to tackle football at a more advanced age.
http://vancouversun.com/sports/football/nfl/neurologist-shocked-by-latest-brain-injury-findings-for-ex-nfl-players
The evidence that collision sports create long-term cognitive problems keeps growing, even for those engaged in a contact sport at the youth level.
http://vancouversun.com/sports/sports-concussions-and-neurological-damageQuote:
Eliminating full-contact hitting from all practices. Creating a “super helmet” equipped with an outer layer that crumples on impact, lessening the impact to a player’s brain. Special turf under layers that cushion falls. These are some of the extraordinary steps being taken to make football a safer game.
But Dr. Steve Galetta of New York University’s Langone Medical Center, who understands the vagaries of concussions and brain trauma as well as anyone, has his doubts that the sport can eliminate the worry every parent feels when their kid decides to play football, hockey or another collision sport. In Vancouver for the 68th annual convention of the American Academy of Neurology (AAN), the exuberant 59-year-old native of Brooklyn, N.Y., even wonders whether the neurological effects of playing football — from grammar school to sprint football at the University of Pennsylvania — will catch up to him one day. ...
“If you have a 10-year history in collision sport, you have a 25-fold greater risk of having cognitive problems,” Galetta said. “In the 12 years I played, I would have all the factors that are now emerging as high risk. I do think about it very much. I love football. I love watching it. It gave me a tremendous advantage in understanding teamwork, in overcoming adversity. But I have deep concerns as a parent. I would likely advise not doing it." ...
Galetta, a leading neuro-ophthalmologist, and colleague Dr. Laura Balcer, vice-chair of neurology and co-director of Langone’s concussion centre, are among medical professionals drawn to the new scourge of sports concussions and chronic brain disease from other areas of neurology. Sports neurology became an official section of the AAN only eight years ago. (The medical society was established in 1948.) Today, programs related to concussion and sports medicine are proliferating. “It’s the fastest growing area in neurology,” Galetta said. “There is a lot of uncharted water here.” ...
Since vision impairment is one of the pronounced symptoms of concussion — “50 per cent of the brain’s pathways are dedicated to vision” — Galetta and Balcer expanded their focus into that area. They authored a study of a simple eye test, known as the King-Devick sideline test, that can help diagnose a concussion in less than a minute, using three pages of numbers and a stopwatch. The B.C. Lions were one of four Canadian Football League teams trying out the test last season. Balcer believes the beauty of KD is that it works for athletes as young as five years old and can be administered by a parent. “There is no substitute for a parent’s judgment, or anyone’s judgment, that a child should come out of a game,” she says. “The KD test is helpful when there’s ambiguity. But there is no be-all and end-all test for concussion.” ...
Everyone knows that professional football is a violent and dangerous game, with long-term implications for its participants. What’s more concerning to Galetta and Balcer are the 99 per cent whose careers in youth sports must be weighed on the risk-reward scale of a mounting public health issue.“ The real problem is at the youth level, where two-thirds of sports concussions occur, and there’s no way you can have athletic trainers there,” Galetta said. “Parents need to be empowered, or have a group of people who know exactly what should happen, if their kid appears to have a meaningful injury. Emerging scientific evidence is showing that banging your head on a repetitive basis is not a good idea. For some, it could be catastrophic.”
The greatest obstacle in getting that message through is sometimes the athletes themselves. A Penn study involving 250 respondents, lured by a $5 Starbucks gift card, asked if they had tried to hide a previous concussion. Forty-three per cent replied in the affirmative; another 22 per cent said they would do it again. “Studies have shown concussions are reported 10 times more frequently after a season than in the season,” Galena explains. “Undetected or unreported concussions are actually far more frequent. So, we still have a lot of education to do.”
Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE) has claimed another NFL victim - Bubba Smith, the 90th NFLer diagnosed with the concussion related disorder.
http://www.tampabay.com/sports/lates...-smith/2278813Quote:
Bubba Smith, the All-Pro defensive end in the NFL who went on to a second career as a movie actor, had chronic traumatic encephalopathy, the degenerative brain disease linked to repeated head trauma, when he died in 2011.
The findings were confirmed by researchers affiliated with the Department of Veterans Affairs, Boston University and the Concussion Legacy Foundation, and released Tuesday with the permission of the executor of Smith's estate.Smith is the 90th former NFL player found to have had CTE by the researchers at the Boston University brain bank; they have examined 94 former pro players. On a scale of 1 to 4 used by the neuropathologist who examined Smith's brain, Smith had Stage 3 CTE, with symptoms that included cognitive impairment and problems with judgment and planning.
Smith died at age 66 of an overdose of phentermine, a weight-loss drug.
At 6 feet 7 inches and nearly 300 pounds, Smith was a quick and powerful lineman chosen as the No. 1 overall pick in the 1967 draft by the Baltimore Colts.
With the announcement that famous NFL players Gale Sayers and Dwight Clark are suffering from dementia and ALS, the price of playing pro football is being discussed again.
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Because we know more today than we ever have, so many people who read about Gale Sayers and Dwight Clark over the weekend found themselves scrutinizing their stories of disease, pain and mortality for an answer to the obvious, inevitable question.
They found that Clark himself, and Sayers’ family, looked for the same answer. It’s the one people no longer are naive enough not to expect.
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"Like the doctor at the Mayo Clinic said, 'Yes, a part of this has to be on football,'" Sayers’ wife Ardie told the Kansas City Star about the cause of the dementia that became public in a story late Saturday night.
"It wasn’t so much getting hit in the head … It’s just the shaking of the brain when they took him down with the force they play the game in."
Some 24 hours later, Clark got to that point midway through his open letter revealing his diagnosis with ALS, Lou Gehrig’s Disease. "I’ve been asked if playing football caused this. I don’t know for sure. But I certainly suspect it did," Clark wrote. "And I encourage the NFLPA and the NFL to continue working together in their efforts to make the game of football safer, especially as it relates to head trauma." ...
The awful price that football extracts just looms larger as the players paying it become sharper and more full-color in our memories. The number of players from Sayers’ era who are meeting this fate, and who can trace it to football, keeps growing, while their actual numbers are shrinking. Fates, which once seemed just consequences of age or bad luck or tragic personal problems, now are unveiled as connected to the sport they played for America’s entertainment.
Sayers is 73. Another Hall of Famer from his heyday, tight end John Mackey, lost his battle with dementia six years ago, at 69. Sayers’ story mimics Mackey’s in numerous disturbing ways: public appearances where he didn’t recognize friends or acknowledge fans or connect with highlights of his own career.
Besides Clark, at least two well-known NFL players since the turn of the century have publicly fought ALS — O.J. Brigance and Steve Gleason — but the possible connection to their playing is a very recent development.
In fact, as a third player diagnosed with ALS shows, the connection is downright complicated.
Kevin Turner challenged the NFL’s settlement of the class-action concussion lawsuit based on his post-career struggles. After he died a year ago this month, the renowned researchers at Boston University discovered Turner actually had CTE, which produced symptoms almost identical to those associated with ALS. Which makes the news about Clark a few degrees more chilling. Turner was just 46. Gleason turned 40 on Sunday. Brigance is 47. Clips of their NFL exploits (including Gleason’s legendary punt block in the first post-Katrina Saints game in the Superdome) are available 24-7. ...
For years, the sights of players limping at young ages, shaking hands with gnarled fingers or struggling to turn their necks from side to side were the saddest sights fans could imagine. They're now being replaced by the effects of brains deteriorating and taking bodies along with them — sometimes violently, as the Junior Seaus, Dave Duersons and Andre Waterses have shown. It’s wreaking havoc through more and more generations of players, coming closer to even the youngest ones. The time at which we see players being debated in free agency, even the draft, paying the price of playing this sport gets closer every day.
Once again the NHL playoffs are played under a different set of rules where much of the rulebook is thrown away and injuries, especially concussions, of which Crosby's is only one of many, with there lifelong implications abound.
https://www.pressreader.com/canada/m...81891593178124Quote:
Because it’s the Cup — that old NHL marketing campaign, which featured players battling through adversity on their way to a championship, is one way of explaining what happened to Sidney Crosby in Monday’s game against the Washington Capitals.Playoff hockey is high-stakes hockey. It’s violent, aggressive and sometimes dirty. It’s both ugly and beautiful. It’s putting away the whistles and letting them play.It’s Scott Stevens knocking Paul Kariya out cold with an open-ice hit, only to have Kariya come back and score the gamewinner. It’s Claude Lemieux ramming Kris Draper’s face into the dasher boards or Nathan Horton being stretchered off the ice in the final. It’s everything you love and everything you hate about the sport rolled into one.So when Alex Ovechkin swung his stick at Crosby’s head as if it were a baseball in the opening minutes of Game 3 and then Matt Niskanen followed it up by cross-checking the Pittsburgh Penguins captain in the face as he was falling to the ice, it wasn’t surprising that some simply shrugged their shoulders and defended it as a hockey play.After all, this was playoff hockey. That means concussions — like the one that may knock Crosby out of the post-season — are part of the game. ...Yes, but why do the playoffs have to become a demolition derby? Why do they have to turn into The Hunger Games?Only hockey makes its star players run through a gauntlet of slashes and cheap hits every time they touch the puck in the post-season. Only hockey seems to have two rule books: one for the regular season and a much thinner version for the playoffs.Apparently Crosby should have known what he was signing up for when he drove the puck to the net. He should have known players were more interested in taking him out than taking the puck. You want to see skill? Go watch figure skating.It’s not just Crosby. And it’s not just this series or this year’s playoffs. A year ago, it was Kris Letang who delivered a headshot on Marcus Johansson. A week ago, Predators forward Kevin Fiala had his leg broken after Blues defenceman Robert Bortuzzo drove him needlessly into the end boards in Game 1. In the first round, Ovechkin nearly had his knee blown out after receiving a low-bridge hit from Toronto’s Nazem Kadri.I’m not going to say what Ovechkin or Niskanen did was malicious or intentional. Reputations are at stake and not just for Ovechkin — who has been criticized unfairly as a player who cannot raise his level of play in the playoffs — but for the entire Capitals team.Did they play Crosby harder than usual? Did they step over the line in trying to contain him? If so, it’s nothing we haven’t seen before.Maybe, like Kariya, Crosby will return and play the hero. Maybe, like Bobby Clarke with his slash on Valeri Kharlamov in the 1972 Summit Series, this will be remembered as the time Ovechkin finally was willing to do whatever it took to win a Cup.Either way, it seems the NHL has another defining moment for its marketing campaign.