This is Your Brain on Football

A friend of The Great Brain Robbery mentioned reading about ALS in athletes, specifically football players. So we looked it up, and indeed, a study published in Neurology in 2012 reveals some alarming results.

Professional football players in American have a higher risk of dying from ALS and Alzheimer’s disease, according to the study. (Researchers pointed out that they were examining death certificates specifically, and that without post-mortem examinations, it can be difficult to diagnose chronic traumatic encephalopathy as a contributor to an ex-football player’s death.)

And when we think of football players bashing heads, we think of the defensive line and the offensive line crashing their helmets together on every play. Linebackers and running backs, for example, don’t see helmet-to helmet contact on every down.

But the scientists looking at the data discovered that, in fact, it was the high-speed players, not the linemen, who were even more likely to die from diseases related to damaging brain cells.

Those big hits have effect that literally lasts for the rest of a player’s life.

What can be done about this? Other than rule changes, not much. In an interview with Freakonomics radio, Dr. Robert Cantu said that helmets built to prevent death may do a worse job of preventing concussions. So, while deaths during football games are down to zero (for NFL players), deaths from having played football are as high as ever.

Fans often refer to football players as gladiators, men who killed one another for the entertainment of bored citizens. The analogy, hyperbolic when it was coined, is becoming increasingly, depressingly apt.