Cutting Down Concussions (And Junk Science)

What ? I find nothing in this article to direct anger towards. This thread is not as exciting as the discussion on nuclear armageddon.

I know. I had terrible timing for this one.
 
How about this: the Longhorn Network prevents concussions.

hate to disagree with you, but there is a control group of normal brains. In average brains (including those who fell off high chairs and head butted their frat bros), CTE affects something like 5 in 1000. Yet CTE “dark spots” have been found in 95% of former NFL brains.

Bill Simmons interviewed Chris Nowinski march 8th, and it was some pretty interesting stuff. Give it a listen next time you’re sitting in traffic.

http://espn.go.com/espnradio/player?rd=1#/podcenter/?autoplay=1&callsign=ESPNRADIO&id=6193890

Should we show them the video from the BC Labs where we force Vasherized to run into steel walls with various things on his head? Remember the lamp shade? Damn.

…Riddell advised football teams to stop using the VSR4, long the company’s best seller.

And advised them to buy new helmets?

In other news, my barber just advised me that I should get my hair cut much more often… staring immediately. He didn’t have any particular helmet recommendation, though.

For starters, we need brains from healthy former athletes who don’t exhibit aberrance to provide control groups. Lots of them

My understanding is that you pretty much have to be dead to be diagnosed with CTE. Therefore, it’s pretty difficult to find a healthy former athlete who’s also dead to use as a control group.

echo base -
 
The brains they have are almost exclusively of NFL players who exhibited irregular behaviors and Nowinski’s sample sizes are miniscule. It’s called selection bias. It is not a broad cross section of athlete brains. In short, we need Roger Staubach and Drew Brees’ brain just as much we need Andre Waters and Dave Duerson.
  
And if CTE is present in more or less all NFL brains, then we need to understand why a minority exhibits pathology while so many do not. Predisposing genetic factors etc. That doesn’t even consider college and high school populations.
 
The relevance of the 5 in 1000 for the general population is that even this small occurrence means a huge raw number of people in a population of 300 million. If that pathology was so cleanly linked to aberrant behavior, I suspect CTE-head would be a part of our lexicon as much as crackhead or tweaker.
 
The idea that CTE = explanation for all crazy ex NFLer incidents (as it’s currently being used in the media) has no scientific basis.
 
In short, you can’t wave around a numerator without a denominator.

roach -
 
My understanding is that you pretty much have to be dead to be diagnosed with CTE. Therefore, it’s pretty difficult to find a healthy former athlete who’s also dead to use as a control group.
  
Correct. CTE can only be revealed by post-mortem brain examination.
 
Uh, we’re all going to die roach. It’s simply a matter of getting “healthy” ex-players to volunteer to give up their brains for study. I’m positive epidemiologists have already started soliciting them.

Replace the “Hawaii Fullback” with me and the “porous drywall” with steel and it basically looked like this.

Full disclosure: I have had three concussions.

Correct. CTE can only be revealed by post-mortem brain examination.

False.

Don’t they have to dye the brain cells to see CTE? Not sure how that could happen while you’re alive, unless a squid f*cks you in the earhole.

Eh, I’ll Google it.

The answer is a big fat maybe. The NYT has an article from Dec 2010 about using magnetic resonance spectroscopy to possibly identify CTE in the living. MRS is like an MRI but it returns chemical composition rather than a physical image. The scientists in the article go to great pains to explain that the evidence they have is too statistically small to say anything, but that initial scans of five athletes with CTE symptoms all showed the same abnormal chemical markers. Google didn’t really bring up a lot about it otherwise.

hxxp://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/02/sports/football/02concussions.html

Another interesting tidbit from the article: if CTE is in fact widespread amongst NFL players and they come up with a way to diagnose it in the living, the NFL could be screwed. Any NFL player who’s played a game in California is covered by its very generous workers comp laws. You can do the math from there.

Right now CTE can only be definitively diagnosed to a publish-in-journal scientific standard by direct tissue examination.
 
Markers, hunches, and high probabilities don’t mean shit. We’re talking science. All literature majors please leave this thread.

I think the problem is that all the armor that players wear is just too good. Before we had hard plastic shoulder pads and helmets players couldn’t spear each other. Now its a pretty stupid thing to do, but you can still put your head on a ball and walk away.

“All literature majors please leave this thread.”

Scipio, you words needs to be carved in stone and placed above the science and engineering buildings on campus so that it can survive 10 thousand years.

Markers, hunches, and high probabilities don’t mean shit. We’re talking science. All literature majors please leave this thread.
 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKHoMi-U8g4

Scipio, you words needs to be carved in stone and placed above the science and engineering buildings on campus so that it can survive 10 thousand years.
 
Actually, I’m just trying to give Sailor Ripley a hard time.
 
The only words I ever want to see carved in stone are:
 
Ass, Gas, or Cash: No One Ride For Free.

I hate it when Scipio tries to go all poultry scientist on us. I was trying to riff on the Vasherized thing…

Anyway, thoughtful article Scipio. Has A&M left the Big Shit yet?

Great analysis Scip. I agree with the junk science description.

for those wanting to see a brain being cut up:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/video/2011/jul/19/brain-injuries-nfl-footballers-video

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2011/jul/19/nfl-star-brain-injuries-destroyed

Jellyman!

Wouldn’t you need non-athletes to use as the control group?

My whole problem with the way CTE is covered is that there’s a popular belief just concussions and sudden violent impacts which cause it – the NFL exploits this by fining James Harrison etc and pretending like it’s doing something about the problem.

The C in CTE is for “chronic” – the current thinking (whether or not it’s junk science) is that it’s a result of the cumulative effects of numerous impacts rather than a big hit or two (not that a big hit isn’t damaging as well).

Here’s the root of the problem…

Bob – there may be some truth to your humor. A minority of people may be predisposed to develop CTE based on an abnormal cellular response to repeated neuron or blood vessel microtrauma – kind of like inflammation run amok over time where the inflammatory response, and not the inciting trauma itself, is the main contributor to the progression of CTE. In the brain, secondary cell death is a term used to describe the toxic overactivation of neuronal glutamate receptors after head trauma, seizures, or ischemic events. In theory, if you mitigate or stop the overactivation of glutamate receptors and associated pathways to eventual cell death, you could preserve a lot more otherwise healthy brain following an insult.

It could be that current headgear is adequate for most while no type of headgear will adequately prevent symptomatic CTE in those predisposed.

Another question relates to brain ‘reserve’. To what extent is everyone experiencing microtrauma in football with the same or similar process that can lead to CTE, and to what extent do some have ‘more to lose’ before any symptoms might appear?

It could be that someone like Scipio, for example, could lose a lot of brain from chronic head trauma without CTE manifesting while the same amount of loss in another would be symptomatic. Or perhaps in a less dramatic way, while Scipio may not appear outright encephalopathic, his persona might become indistinguishable from nordberg.

Uh, we’re all going to die roach. It’s simply a matter of getting "healthy" ex-players to volunteer to give up their brains for study. I’m positive epidemiologists have already started soliciting them

Clearly, we’re all going to die, I’m merely pointing out that since the healthy players will likely live much longer than the ones with CTE, it’s going to take a while before they have a decent sample size of players that played at the same time, with the same equipment etc.

As he said, the point isn’t that it has been conclusively proven that football is so dangerous that it should immediately be banned it everywhere. It’s that clearly further study is needed. Controls, peer review, epidemiologists and neurologists all, to be sure. But while the government approved and semi-taxpayer funded cartel of asshole billionaires that already has the most absurdly favorable labor rules one could ever imagine for an athletic league spends its time drooling and rubbing its hands together at the thought of wresting away another billion dollars from its employees, it might also decide to actually acknowledge the potential scope of the problem and devote some resources toward investigating it and mitigating it. And the moronocracy that is sports journalism might also try to put some pressure on the billionaire assholes to take some responsibility for the consequences of their business. Instead, we all spend on time on meaningless sideshows like tut-tutting James Harrison for saying nasty things about blessed Roger Goddell, and whether or not Bart Scott is right that doing away with two-a-days would during the NFL into a collection of weak pussies. Malcolm Gladwell, while a sensationalist, is really not the enemy here.