Reply to NYT article on CTE in kids who play football

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=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.

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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. [/quote]

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