CTE - Should We Be More Concerned?
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I just watched an interview with a CTE expert who has been collecting brains from NFL players and more recently Soccer, Rugby, AFL and League and the early results are quite frankly pretty bloody scary.
With Billy Guyton being the first Rugby case where he had stage 2 of 4 CTE at age 33 when he died. Unfortunately, at the moment they can only diagnose CTE post mortem meaning we have no real idea just how many rugby players are impacted. But if NFL is any guide of the 376 brains they examined 345 had CTE or 91.7% These numbers are truly frightening. (The actual percentage will be lower as those brains collected are from players whose death maybe contributed to CTE so they are self-selecting in a way)
One interesting thing he mentioned was when he played football, he only thought you had to be knocked out to be truly concussed. He did not realise simply seeing stars, are taking a big hit could be deemed a concussion. And over years you can accumulate many concussions which ultimately lead to CTE.
He suggests that each governing body of sports should be keeping a register of concussions on every single player from school level to professional so you can track how many individual concussions each player has had so you can better determine the risks of CTE.
Chat GPT tells us the Symptoms being
Behavioral Symptoms:
Aggression: CTE can lead to increased irritability, impulsivity, and aggressive outbursts.
Impulse control problems: Difficulty managing anger, frustration, and urges.
Social withdrawal: Individuals may isolate themselves from friends and family, or become less socially appropriate.
Depression and anxiety: Mood swings, feelings of sadness, and heightened anxiety can be common.Psychiatric Symptoms:
Suicidality: Increased risk of suicidal thoughts and behaviors.
Paranoia: Suspiciousness and mistrust of others.
Motor problems: Changes in gait, balance, and coordination.Other potential symptoms:
Headaches: May experience persistent or recurrent headaches.
Slurred speech: Difficulty speaking clearly.
Unsteadiness when walking: Difficulty maintaining balance and coordination.He also mentions soccer and that heading the ball can lead to CTE and he does not understand why young kids are heading the ball at all.
I realise Rugby is not tiddlywinks but I am curious what people's thoughts are on this. Should we be more concerned about CTE or do you think players know the risks? Will Jordan, Hayman, Conrad Smith all come to mind of players with concussion issues.
Link to podcast:
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@nonpartizan said in CTE - Should We Be More Concerned?:
Of all the physical sports I think rugby has the greatest scope to make it safer since rugby has never fundamentally been about hurting people or providing a blood sport type of spectacle for a baying mob
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how old are you?
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@nonpartizan Yes, it will be interesting to see where the data leads, but I suspect Rugby has a pretty high-risk factor as well given the number of HIA fails we get every week. I assume internally they are keeping records on how many HIA fails each player gets or even checks.
I remember playing as a kid getting concussed a few times and being told to stay awake and if I start vomiting to see a doctor. But never went to a doctor and was back playing the next week. I would have taken hits to the head plenty of times and that was just all junior level stuff.
Once they get a test/scan that can check for CTE in living players we will get a full picture of how each sport is impacted.
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Will be interesting to see how Burgess and Nadolo are faring a few years down the track. 151kg and 160kg respectively. Fucken hell that is a lot of beef.
When a league hard man like Mark Carroll says how stupid this ‘sport’ is it speaks volumes
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@nonpartizan said in CTE - Should We Be More Concerned?:
@chimoaus said in CTE - Should We Be More Concerned?:
@nonpartizan Yes, it will be interesting to see where the data leads, but I suspect Rugby has a pretty high-risk factor as well given the number of HIA fails we get every week. I assume internally they are keeping records on how many HIA fails each player gets or even checks.
I remember playing as a kid getting concussed a few times and being told to stay awake and if I start vomiting to see a doctor. But never went to a doctor and was back playing the next week. I would have taken hits to the head plenty of times and that was just all junior level stuff.
Once they get a test/scan that can check for CTE in living players we will get a full picture of how each sport is impacted.
Yeah back in the day it was the whole magic sponge, shake it off, tough it out type of mentality. The worst injury I got was in my first year of playing when I lost my front tooth in a head collision (with my own teammate, lol)..... I went to the dentist but received no treatment for the head injury as such. Just how it was back then.
One thing I'd be curious to see is how rugbys data compares to league and specifically sevens.
I don't watch a ton of sevens but when I do watch I don't tend to see a lot of concussive contact. The name of the game is avoiding contact, I feel like rugby has moved away from that over the years.
I'm super thankful my doctor highly recommended me to stop playing rugby in 2010 after too many head knocks (three concussions) during my playing days. 15 years later, even though it was a bloody tough decision at the time, I'm bloody thankful I took on his advice after looking at those numbers initially posted by @chimoaus, bloody scary really.
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Well without being stupid, should WE be more concerned. As I 70yo and stopped playing quite sometime ago, for me the anser is no.
But if I was still playing I probably would feel the need to be concerned, and with a hell of a lot of sports,. I would suggest anyone getting a few bad head knocks would need to really strongly their choices going forward. -
If you watch any of the Japanese school teams at the Sanix tournament, they almost all wear headgear, irrespective of position. I assume that is a directive from the JRFU for players of that age to limit the effect of any major head knocks. The majority of the Japanese girl/women's sevens players do the same.
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@nonpartizan rugby is a violent sport played by violent men. There is no way to play it, especially in the forwards, but probably these days also in teh midfield, without embracing the violence.
Yes we've got rid of the punches and the worst of the high shots, it's a significantly safer sport than it was even 20 years ago from those two perspectives alone.
But for every concussion caused by getting a deliberate smack in the head there are probably 20 caused by all the incidental contact that make up a rugby game. Rugby is a game played at low height with your head forward. Its very nature is front on combat. And if you want to win games of rugby there is absolutely no way to do it other than to beat the guy in front of you in a test of force.
And the higher up the levels you go, the higher the violence and force of those confrontations is.
Without fundamentally changing the nature of the game, you cannot eliminate head "trauma" for want of a better word. In fact i would go a step further and say rugby league has a better chance of achieving this dream than rugby union, due to the absence of the breakdown, mauls, and scrum force. Even without those it is still an impossible dream. Where you have massive units moving at each other at speed, head contact is inevitable.
I've said it over and over, if sports want to get serious on head injuries then they need to save players from themselves rather than each other. You can red card every minor head contact that happens in a game and still do less to prevent these future issues than just by making mandatory stand downs longer and more easily triggered.
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@mariner4life Great post and totally agree, there should be good records kept and perhaps longer progressive stand downs the more HIA you fail.
I guess with all of these sports the money for the top athletes makes the choice for the individual player even harder. That is why the governing body needs rules that enforce longer stand downs and perhaps forced retirement if they sustain x number of concussions.
Fingers crossed the test doesn’t take too long to develop.
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They need to make rule changes to de-emphasise the box kick and aerial contest aspect, and to increase the value of being extremely fit rather than fucking massive.
Also need to make the current card lottery consistent, and harsh. And at a minimum HIA the victim every time.
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Chronic traumatic encephalopathy - Wikipedia
