They Played Football as Children. Now Their Families Mourn.
August 26, 2024 at 08:57PMWe tend to think of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) as being associated with repeated concussions sustained by longtime football players. But the young men described in this feature gave up the game after high school, and still the damage to their brains was already done. Now, their families are grieving their loss and looking for answers:
CTE isn’t just about diagnosed concussions, most of which go on to heal with no obvious, lasting effects. It’s about repeated, seemingly benign assaults to brain tissue, little “dings” that could occur dozens of times in a single game and that a player may not even clock but that nonetheless cause damage at the cellular level—microscopically torn blood vessels, disconnected neurons, jumbled tau proteins (the building blocks of the fibers that carry nutrients and messages from cell to cell). Given time, the brain can usually repair this damage—except when players don’t even know there’s been damage, and so don’t grant themselves time to recover. In that case, injuries can compound until the brain is overwhelmed, until—unable to reconfigure themselves—the tau proteins essentially rot, creating toxic lesions that spread deeper into the brain and even sometimes into the brain stem. This past June, the largest CTE study to date confirmed that the best predictor of future brain disease was not the number of diagnosed concussions a player had sustained but rather the cumulative force of all hits to the head throughout their career. In other words, a lot of little impacts could be as damaging as a smattering of major ones.
This means that when kids across America suit up this fall to square off on the gridiron, every hit will matter, every “ding” and every bell rung will count toward an unspecified number past which the brain might be permanently impaired. It means that no amount of concussion protocols can definitively stave off disaster, that some level of danger is lurking in every play. It means that America’s greatest game is hurting our children in insidious and incalculable ways, and that addressing the issue might mean fundamentally changing the way we teach a game that has become fundamental to America’s sense of self.
“It’s a really profound problem to confront, especially for a sport that’s been at the center of so much of our community and cultural life, as youth football is and has been,” says Kathleen Bachynski, a professor of public health at Muhlenberg College and author of No Game for Boys to Play: The History of Youth Football and the Origins of a Public Health Crisis. Bachynski’s research details a long history of medical objections that have done little to intercept the sport’s cultural dominance. In the 1890s, The Chicago Tribune announced that football would “physically ruin thousands of young men.” In the early 1900s, the brutality of Ivy League games led them to be described as “boy-killing, education-prostituting, gladiatorial sport” (even Teddy Roosevelt intervened, leading to the limitation of certain plays). And throughout the 20th century, doctors continued to sound the alarm in publications like the Journal of the American Medical Association (“Football is no game for boys to play”), the Journal of School Health (“More concussions occur in football than is generally realized”), and the American Journal of Public Health (“[Children are] encouraged to addle their own brains with repeated concussions in such sports as football and boxing”). Meanwhile, as boxing declined in popularity, football’s reach only grew. Youth leagues began mushrooming in the Sixties. Kids as young as five suited up. “It’s really hard for us, societally, to confront something that we thought was great might not have been so great,” says Bachynski of this cultural expansion. “But there are some health risks that we have decided even a fully-informed parent can’t allow their kid to [take]. If you understand all the risks and harms of cigarettes, you cannot let your 12-year-old smoke a cigarette—that’s not something you can choose as a parent. And we have to decide: ‘Do repeated head impacts fall in that category?’”
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2024/08/26/they-played-football-as-children-now-their-families-mourn/
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