Reply to NYT article on CTE in kids who play football

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][mastodon][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. 
[/quote]

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.

[quote] 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.[/quote]

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?

[quote] 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.[/quote]

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.

[quote] 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).[/quote]

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.

and some of the symptoms like rage are explained as part of the person's personality and never attributed to cte. I know kids in their 20s now who had lots of head trauma, concussions and they have anger problems. One of them fell off academically quickly. Parents who ignore this are foolish.[/quote]

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