NYT article on CTE in kids who play football

[Anonymous]

Football participation rates are way down, especially for full team high school football. I love the sport as a spectator, but after the concussion stuff started be coming clearer I drifted away from watching it.

I do think it's a shame that it probably can't be done safely, because I know people for whom football was a really positive force in their lives as players and I do think intesne physical contact can be a good thing for kids when it's safe. Still, I'm glad I have a daughter and don't have to make the choice (she also hated skating when she tried that which ended a brief interest in playing hockey).

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I can’t believe that people can still watch professional football knowing what we know now, let alone letting their children play.

Same. It’s disgusting. My kid asked to play and I said no. Just like I said to other risky things he wants to do.

I don’t personally find football interesting. But every adult male I know, my husband, our relatives on both sides, all of our good friends/neighbors, ALL follow college or NFL, or both. Many also enjoy basketball/baseball/hockey, but for most of them football is their #1 fav. And these are highly educated nerds who never played.

[Anonymous]

I feel terrible for low income/minority boys whose families don’t have the know how to dissuade them from playing football (I’m a minority and know that my parents would have let my brothers play). People should stop watching football on TV out attending games, it’s the least we can do for those boys.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I feel terrible for low income/minority boys whose families don’t have the know how to dissuade them from playing football (I’m a minority and know that my parents would have let my brothers play). People should stop watching football on TV out attending games, it’s the least we can do for those boys.

Pretty much. Theres’s going to be a point where no rich/well to do off families allow their kids to play a sport like football. It’ll be a sport only the “poors” play because they fantasize about opportunities for riches and glory in the pros, which of course 99% of the players will never reach but blow their brains out by age 17 attempting to get there. Meanwhile, the rich enjoy the entertainment on TV every weekend while players continue to get injured for life. It’s nothing more than modern day gladiators.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I feel terrible for low income/minority boys whose families don’t have the know how to dissuade them from playing football (I’m a minority and know that my parents would have let my brothers play). People should stop watching football on TV out attending games, it’s the least we can do for those boys.

Pretty much. Theres’s going to be a point where no rich/well to do off families allow their kids to play a sport like football. It’ll be a sport only the “poors” play because they fantasize about opportunities for riches and glory in the pros, which of course 99% of the players will never reach but blow their brains out by age 17 attempting to get there. Meanwhile, the rich enjoy the entertainment on TV every weekend while players continue to get injured for life. It’s nothing more than modern day gladiators.

+1 it’s so true and so gross

[Anonymous]

All the CTE studies are seriously biased. They only study the brains of people who have symptoms of CTE. They rarely have a control group.

Do I believe CTE exists? Yes. Do I believe football increases your risk of getting it? Yes. Do I think it’s been blown out of proportion? Definitely.

Think about it. How many older men do you know who played football in high school and college? I know a lot of them. You probably do too. They all played in a time when they hit over and over again at every practice with really inadequate head protection.

The people I know who have symptoms of CTE have never played football. If CTE was as prevalent as the media makes it out to be, we’d all know so many people with CTE. Again, I think it’s real and that the people in the news really have it, I just think it’s overblown.

I think the benefits of letting your high schooler play football outweigh the risks of CTE given the current real information that we have. I reserve the right to change my mind if they ever do a decent study with new information. I also think that flag football is better prior to high school.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I feel terrible for low income/minority boys whose families don’t have the know how to dissuade them from playing football (I’m a minority and know that my parents would have let my brothers play). People should stop watching football on TV out attending games, it’s the least we can do for those boys.

But it’s not just this population that lets their kids play. I know several wealthy, educated families here in DMV that let their boys play HS football. I also know one family were the father, a surgeon, coaches his kid’s football team. The kids played MS and HS football (I don’t know about younger).

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:All the CTE studies are seriously biased. They only study the brains of people who have symptoms of CTE. They rarely have a control group.

Do I believe CTE exists? Yes. Do I believe football increases your risk of getting it? Yes. Do I think it’s been blown out of proportion? Definitely.

Think about it. How many older men do you know who played football in high school and college? I know a lot of them. You probably do too. They all played in a time when they hit over and over again at every practice with really inadequate head protection.

The people I know who have symptoms of CTE have never played football. If CTE was as prevalent as the media makes it out to be, we’d all know so many people with CTE. Again, I think it’s real and that the people in the news really have it, I just think it’s overblown.

I think the benefits of letting your high schooler play football outweigh the risks of CTE given the current real information that we have. I reserve the right to change my mind if they ever do a decent study with new information. I also think that flag football is better prior to high school.

It’s hard to have a control group for CTE. There was a recent nytimes article that looked at the effects of firing rocket launchers and similar weapon that emit enormous shock waves. There are markers for brain injury that can be detected with blood tests. If there is not one already in progress, doctors need to do a long term study that follows cohorts of athletes at low, medium, and high risk for concussion - tennis, bowling, snow sports, ice hockey, soccer, equestrian, football etc, and measure markers for brain injury, interviews for symptoms, and finally post mortem exams. It will take a very long time, but it will give us the relative risk, incidence, prevalence for cte that we are missing today. It will also tell us if we can correlate markers of brain injury with eventual cte. Good science takes a long time.

Until then, as parents, we have to use our best judgment. The three risks I am unyielding about when it comes to sports are repeated blows to the head, risk of catastrophic spinal injury, and repeated high impact to spine/hips/large joints. Thus, no football, ice hockey, equestrian, gymnastics, figure skating, park and pipe skiing, etc. Other parents make different choices, I don’t judge.

[Anonymous]

[mastodon]

Anonymous wrote:All the CTE studies are seriously biased. They only study the brains of people who have symptoms of CTE. They rarely have a control group.

Do I believe CTE exists? Yes. Do I believe football increases your risk of getting it? Yes. Do I think it’s been blown out of proportion? Definitely.

Except Boston University has already showed that in totality, they were able to make correlations between numbers of years of football played and severity of CTE in brain samples, i.e. a dose response relation appears to exist for cause and effect. You can also compare to the natural history of normal, young brains that medical science knows about. Finding the levels of tau entanglements observed in football players’ brains is not normal, or else it wouldn’t have ever been worthy of note to be repeatedly published in journals like JAMA, etc. There’s also a flip side to your argument - brains studied have been from those with CTE symptoms, that can also mean the levels of CTE n brains of football players are actually being vastly underreported because we don’t get samples from those with no symptoms when they die. No one knows what the long term consequences are though.

Think about it. How many older men do you know who played football in high school and college? I know a lot of them. You probably do too. They all played in a time when they hit over and over again at every practice with really inadequate head protection.

Not sure what your point is here. I know many obese people and smokers who’ve never had heart attacks or lung cancer. Therefore I should conclude then that obesity and smoking don’t contribute to heart attacks and cancer?

The people I know who have symptoms of CTE have never played football. If CTE was as prevalent as the media makes it out to be, we’d all know so many people with CTE. Again, I think it’s real and that the people in the news really have it, I just think it’s overblown.

And the people you know with CTE symptoms are probably old. No surprise there. Tauopathies occur as people age too, that why people think we get things like Alzheimer’s and dementia. The point is that they’re finding entanglements in the brains of kids that are at levels they see in the brains of 40 and 50 year olds. Kids are literally injuring their brains like boxers who get repeatedly punched n the head to the point of becoming punch drunk.

But it’s not just this population that lets their kids play. I know several wealthy, educated families here in DMV that let their boys play HS football. I also know one family were the father, a surgeon, coaches his kid’s football team. The kids played MS and HS football (I don’t know about younger).

I know doctors that smoke, do all sorts of drugs, and drink gallons of whiskey. Being an MD doesn’t make a person immune to poor health choices and decisions.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:My 10 year old son loves football but so far he’s only played flag football. His father and older cousins played HS football so my son really has the bug. I read the article and shared it with my husband as I don’t want our son to play tackle football…..period. In a year or two I’m sure this will be a big conflict in our marriage.

In the article (I posted a gift link at 11:41) the parents were notably split as to whether they would allow their sons to play if they knew about the risks. In one case, the husband and wife were split. What does your husband say about the risks? It’s true we don’t know the absolute or relative risk. Is the absolute risk 2%? Or .02%? Is the relative risk of football vs soccer 2:1? Or is it 1.1:1? I believe a parent has veto power when there is a legitimate concern, and I hope your husband feels the same.

As a mom of two kids who enjoyed flag, but moved on to sports with a low risk of concussion, it’s hard to understand the power and draw of football that supersedes the recent attention to CTE. There is a sentiment that there is no substitute for football, which seems narrow given that we have so so many opportunities for youth sports in the US. Elite sports are filled with stories of athletes who gave up one sport to play another. I think the pomp and circumstance around nfl, college and high school football in the us really drive the idea that football is king, and there is no substitute. Too bad.

[Anonymous]

I have 2 boys who look like they should be football players. Literally they get asked this all the time and both were approached by the HS coach at their MCPS school to try to get them to play. Neither were interested and we wouldn't have let them play if they had been. The latest NYT story only confirms what their blockbuster stories a few years ago told us about the NFL.

But I see a LOT of parents encouraging their kids to play, including those who surprise me because they should know better. Some of them clearly think any varsity sport is crucial for college admissions so when their kid who is a decent soccer player doesn't make the cut at a HS with 2,000 kids, the parents push them into football. I know a few others who clearly thought football is a way for their small or slightly dorky kids (no shade, my kids are dorky) to become more popular. Either way, it's really sad and incredibly short-sighted.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Do parents still let their kids play tackle football these days? They're finding kids in their teens now with CTE:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/11/16/us/cte-youth-football.html

Im just trying to understand what calculus parents would ever be able to use to come to conclusion that yeah, it's ok for my kid to play a sport where they can risk permanent brain damage for the rest of their lives, even if they're only playing for a few years.

No, no parents anywhere in the entire world still allow their kids to play tackle football.

CTE has really only begun getting attention in the last half dozen years or so after the tragic deaths of some major players. It will be interesting to see if numbers of players drop over the next decade, and whether that is impacted at all by education level, socioeconomic status or region of the country or other factors.

Except its trending the opposite. Youth football numbers are increasing post-Covid

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Tell me on what sane planet a sport like this is good for kids:

You can argue about team sport involvement and physical activity all you want, but the above is what you don’t see that occurs constantly during practices all the time even to this day. The clip at 1:15 n the video is horrifying.

Plenty of other sports like swimming, track, golf, baseball, basketball, tennis, etc. exist.

Those are horrible.

But I've been involved in 3 youth football programs, and attended literally thousands of practices in the area. I've never seen that done at a local practice.

I have seen one coach dismissed for teaching bad form. He was told his kid could stay but he could not. Unsurprisingly, he did not let his kid continue.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Football participation rates are way down, especially for full team high school football. I love the sport as a spectator, but after the concussion stuff started be coming clearer I drifted away from watching it.

I do think it's a shame that it probably can't be done safely, because I know people for whom football was a really positive force in their lives as players and I do think intesne physical contact can be a good thing for kids when it's safe. Still, I'm glad I have a daughter and don't have to make the choice (she also hated skating when she tried that which ended a brief interest in playing hockey).

That's wrong. Youth tackle football participation rates have increased, beginning in 2021.

It's an interesting question about how families have re-assessed risk after the pandemic.

My son plays tackle football. And he wrestles. I did the same.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I feel terrible for low income/minority boys whose families don’t have the know how to dissuade them from playing football (I’m a minority and know that my parents would have let my brothers play). People should stop watching football on TV out attending games, it’s the least we can do for those boys.

Ooof. I think you're heart is in the right place but:

"Low-income people are too stupid to know the dangers of football" is a REALLY bad look.