Contact sports like football and hockey offer young players a healthy outlet to develop their physical fitness, teamwork skills and self confidence. But as many athletes prepare to get back on the field or the ice, a new study is shedding light on how often the same sports can cause serious harm. UBC’s Dr. Shelina Babul spoke with Your Morning Vancouver on Tuesday, about the research showing that the odds of developing chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, is higher than previously thought. CTE is a degenerative brain disease that has been linked to repetitive head impacts, which are common in contact sports. Babul, who is a clinical professor of pediatrics at the UBC faculty of medicine, says the cumulative effect of repeated head trauma can impact brain health, and could lead to brain degradation later in life. “It causes memory changes, it causes impairments in judgement, it causes mood changes from irritability, anxiety, depression, irrational behaviour,” Babul said. The study, published in the British Medical Journal in August, found that at least one-in-four former NFL players who died between 2016 and 2021 had CTE at the time of their death. The researchers from Mass General Brigham, Boston University, and the Concussion & CTE Foundation believe this is a conservative estimate. “Community brain bank studies have shown that CTE affects less than one per cent of the general population,” said the study’s lead author Daniel Daneshvar in a statement on the foundation’s website. “To find that somewhere between 24.5 per cent and 97.7 per cent of NFL players from that time period had this progressive brain disease is a wake-up call for the NFL and scientific communities.” The average age of death for players who donated their brains to the study was just over 70 years, with NFL careers that lasted about five and a half years. The data also showed that the severity of CTE was significantly associated with dementia. While CTE can currently only be diagnosed after death, Babul says there are some red flags to keep an eye out for. “You want to really follow the trajectory of that individual,” she said. “Are you noticing mood changes? Are you noticing cognitive impairments? Are they forgetting?” She says anyone who experiences consistent changes over the course of time should be assessed by a clinician. As for parents who are reconsidering enrolling their kids in contact sports, Babul says a lot more research is still needed. “We need to know who is more vulnerable,” she said. “Is it the number of impacts that that individual has had? Is it the frequency of impacts that that person has had over the course of their life causing these changes in their behaviour?”
