Qman wrote: ↑Wed Jul 26, 2017 8:22 amagain this was talked about on 1040, one of the issues here is families who see signs of dementia, mental problems, etc are the ones donating the brains .. thats why the rates are soooooo high. while thousands of other players brains with no issues, aren't really being tested.South Pender wrote: ↑Tue Jul 25, 2017 1:27 pmA recent and compelling peer-reviewed article from the Journal of the American Medical Association on CTE in NFL players contains some really alarming results.
The authors acknowledge that the study is not fully and perfectly controlled (something that's not possible in research on CTE), but its findings are sufficiently dramatic to support the conclusion, pretty convincingly, that playing football--at least at the pro level--will very likely lead to CTE.
http://www.cnn.com/2017/07/25/health/ct ... index.html
That's true and is what I was implying in my comments about the study not being fully controlled. There is selection bias in the results, and they (the results) don't allow us to predict the true proportion of pro football players that will later exhibit CTE. To my eye, however, the results were sufficiently alarming to conclude that this proportion is likely higher than we might have thought.
Ex-NFL and CFL players have played the game since childhood, and the years of accumulating head trauma--through high-school, college, and pro ball--can really add up and contribute incrementally to ultimate brain damage.