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Wow! New CTE study shows...

Started by Peter Porker, July 25, 2017, 11:02:40 am

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bennyl08

Quote from: SooiecidetillNuttgone on July 30, 2017, 03:24:36 pm
Apparently, you've not been watching the news or ESPN.
To them, the dynamite has been lit and it's just a matter of time before football is blown up.

The reporting of the results has been condemning to say the least, and it's little wonder you'd be arguing the speed at which the wind is blowing all the while ignoring the tornado.

I was unaware the media did the study. Could have sworn it was performed by medical researchers...

Had your posts said the media coverage of the study is slanted, the response would have simply been "no darn sherlock". Media's coverage of science reports are about as straightforward and accurate as a politician answering a debate question, and it's little wonder you'd blame the scientists for having a slanted and rigged study due to the media reporting the results inaccurately.
Quote from: PorkSoda on May 05, 2016, 09:24:05 pm
damn I thought it was only a color, didn't realize it was named after a liqueur. leave it to benny to make me research the history of chartreuse

Hogsmo Kramer

Quote from: bennyl08 on July 30, 2017, 12:36:59 pm
Because football is the only other popular sport in the US besides boxing and mma that has a nearly constant barrage of impacts to the head.

Sure, any sport can have impacts to the head and very damaging ones at that. However, that isn't what CTE is about. It isn't the knockout punch to the head that'll give you CTE, it's the 30-40 light jabs that you take that do the long term damage. Downhill skiing, basketball, baseball, cricket, mountain biking, rock climbing, mountaineering, scuba diving, tennis, racquetball, etc... None of them have that. Soccer is the closest thing in the US but it is way down the list of popular sports, so you aren't going to see much of it on the nightly news. However, if you do follow soccer at all, you most definitely have heard about concerns of CTE and soccer because there are numerous studies linking those two as well. However, unless you seek soccer news, you won't hear as much about it because why would you? News reports on subjects that people care about.

If you go to NZ or South Africa, you're going to be wondering why Rugby is carrying the torch on CTE with sports like american football are arguably even worse? But they get the same answer. Because Rugby is the flag carrying sport in those countries and a new study on a sport where maybe 1% of the population cares about such as american football isn't going to make the nightly news in those countries.

Quote from: redneckfriend on July 30, 2017, 12:48:04 pm
  The answer should be evident. Football is big business at the college and professional level and thousands of kids play it at the high school and college level. They are encouraged by parents and, especially in the south, by whole communities that get behind the high school team. Boxing has long been known to be an unsafe sport and you don't see large numbers of kids signing up to have their heads punched today. The same is true of MMA. Rugby is a niche sport. Hockey and soccer are almost certainly less likely to result in head trauma (although both carry the potential). Mountain biking is a personal sport and as soon as I had my first concussion doing it I quit- no coach there encouraging me to sacrifice for the team.

The argument that there is risk in everything we do, while paralogical to the point, is true. But some risks are greater than others and the magnitude of some risks are known while the magnitude of others, like football, are not. The concern in football is the large number of young people who engage in it without knowing the true risk and the fact, that because of its popularity with older people, they are encouraged to do it by those in authority which may lead them to believe it is safer than it is. They should have the advantage of full disclosure of risk before engaging and no one who cares about their safety should discourage research and conversation on the topic of risk. The NFL has put itself in a bad position, perhaps an ultimately fatal one, through denial of risk of head injury, colleges, as institutions that purport to seek the "truth", should not follow that example.

Both good responses, and honestly my question was more rhetorical than anything, but nice responses nevertheless.

Hogville = The Nexus of the Universe!!!!!

 

MuskogeeHogFan

Quote from: redneckfriend on July 30, 2017, 03:18:49 pm
You are conflating two things here- 1) neuropathological findings and 2) clinical symptoms.

The pathology is diagnostic of CTE (ptau perivascular lesions) so all of the players the study says had some degree of CTE did in fact have it. ptau lesions are an agreed upon convention for the diagnosis of the disease. Not all were severe however and a single ptau lesion is diagnostic. The symptoms, while in constellation are characteristic of CTE, are not diagnostic so it is possible that other factors were involved. What was worrisome is that in this group of players who exhibited symptoms so many had CTE. It is possible that there were unknown contributing causes to this finding but that is speculative at this point.

As far as the years of football played this is a quote from the discussion section of the study: 

"The severity of CTE pathology was distributed across the highest level of play, with all former high school players having mild pathology and the majority of former college, semiprofessional, and professional players having severe pathology. Behavior, mood, and cognitive symptoms were common among those with mild and severe CTE pathology and signs of dementia were common among those with severe CTE pathology."

If there aren't other factors discovered to explain symptoms then it appears that even high school players with mild disease may exhibit clinical CTE. That is another reason for more and better studies -to develop statistical correlation (or non-correlation) between symptoms and the presence of ptau lesions and a statistically meaningful association of symptoms with level of severity.

One must assume that symptoms occur before there is an established need for study or the recording of results.

I'm speaking from actual experience. That establishes a need for study but by no means does it define the methods or parameters of study that are needed to achieve an accurate conclusion.
Go Hogs Go!

yoyog

Thanks redneckfriend for your posts in this thread. You explained the study so much better than any of the articles I've read about the findings. I hope such important research continues to be funded, pursued, and published.

bennyl08

Quote from: MuskogeeHogFan on July 30, 2017, 04:16:26 pm
One must assume that symptoms occur before there is an established need for study or the recording of results.

I'm speaking from actual experience. That establishes a need for study but by no means does it define the methods or parameters of study that are needed to achieve an accurate conclusion.

It would be like studying people who report having headaches and finding that 110/111 were severely dehydrated. Then you come in and say that they need to check to see if the person has been staring at a screen for too long because you've seen first hand that that too can cause a headache. Since the symptom of a headache is what prompted the study, and staring at a screen to long can cause a headache, that needs to be taken into account.

While it is true that staring at a screen can lead to a headache and nobody would be doubting your first hand experience that this other factor can lead to similar symptoms, staring at a screen doesn't lead to somebody becoming dehydrated. Somebody who is that dehydrated would get a headache whether or not they ever looked at a computer screen.

To my knowledge, steroids and speed will not lead to the changes in the brain known as CTE. That solely comes from the repeated impacts. If anybody knows differently, please do correct me. While steroids and other drugs certainly have their side effects on the body's chemistry an can impact personality in a similar way, to my knowledge, whether a person does any of that isn't going to change whether or not they develop CTE. Going back to the above analogy, staring at a screen all day while being dehydrated certainly isn't going to improve a headache, it doesn't change the fact that the person would have had a headache without. Further, the person staring at a screen may be less likely to remove themself in order to get more water to drink, and thus could have indirectly led to the dehydration (i.e. the drugs making a person more aggressive and thus taking more hits to the head), but to say the study is incomplete would be wrong, unless steroid use alone can also cause CTE or change the physiology of the brain to make it more susceptible to CTE. Again, I don't think it does, but I'm not confident enough to bet my life on it.
Quote from: PorkSoda on May 05, 2016, 09:24:05 pm
damn I thought it was only a color, didn't realize it was named after a liqueur. leave it to benny to make me research the history of chartreuse

MuskogeeHogFan

Quote from: bennyl08 on July 30, 2017, 04:47:45 pm
It would be like studying people who report having headaches and finding that 110/111 were severely dehydrated. Then you come in and say that they need to check to see if the person has been staring at a screen for too long because you've seen first hand that that too can cause a headache. Since the symptom of a headache is what prompted the study, and staring at a screen to long can cause a headache, that needs to be taken into account.

While it is true that staring at a screen can lead to a headache and nobody would be doubting your first hand experience that this other factor can lead to similar symptoms, staring at a screen doesn't lead to somebody becoming dehydrated. Somebody who is that dehydrated would get a headache whether or not they ever looked at a computer screen.

To my knowledge, steroids and speed will not lead to the changes in the brain known as CTE. That solely comes from the repeated impacts. If anybody knows differently, please do correct me. While steroids and other drugs certainly have their side effects on the body's chemistry an can impact personality in a similar way, to my knowledge, whether a person does any of that isn't going to change whether or not they develop CTE. Going back to the above analogy, staring at a screen all day while being dehydrated certainly isn't going to improve a headache, it doesn't change the fact that the person would have had a headache without. Further, the person staring at a screen may be less likely to remove themself in order to get more water to drink, and thus could have indirectly led to the dehydration (i.e. the drugs making a person more aggressive and thus taking more hits to the head), but to say the study is incomplete would be wrong, unless steroid use alone can also cause CTE or change the physiology of the brain to make it more susceptible to CTE. Again, I don't think it does, but I'm not confident enough to bet my life on it.

Steriods create a more aggressive attitude and greater strength/bulk. Speed helps with maintaining pace, which contributes to the force X weight equation. Both are contributing factors with regard to collisions and potential head injury.
Go Hogs Go!

bennyl08

Quote from: MuskogeeHogFan on July 30, 2017, 04:59:27 pm
Steriods create a more aggressive attitude and greater strength/bulk. Speed helps with maintaining pace, which contributes to the mass X acceleration equation. Both are contributing factors with regard to collisions and potential head injury.

Help me out here, because I'm not seeing the relevance here. To the use the analogy I made earlier, sounds like you are saying the study is incomplete because they didn't look at why the person was dehydrated, only that they were. I mean, players today are bigger and faster than yesterday's players without using steroids.

Perhaps there's a miscommunication here on what you mean by "incomplete". No single study will be able to cover everything. Thus, each are inherently incomplete. So, when I hear that, I assume the person is implying the study was inherently flawed and the results are meaningless. They forgot to account for something and the error is severe enough that the conclusions they come to can not actually be concluded from the research.

Perhaps you simply mean incomplete in that "there's a lot to look at here and looking at the rates of CTE between steroid users or not would be an interesting additional study".
Quote from: PorkSoda on May 05, 2016, 09:24:05 pm
damn I thought it was only a color, didn't realize it was named after a liqueur. leave it to benny to make me research the history of chartreuse

hogsanity

So, are people afraid that someone will use this information to try to end football as we know it, or are people afraid the data is true, and as more is found out football will suffer because of it?
People ask me what I do in winter when there is no baseball.  I will tell you what I do. I stare out the window, and I wait for spring.

"Anything goes wrong, anything at all, your fault, my fault, nobodies fault, I'm going to blow your head off."  John Wayne in BIG JAKE

MuskogeeHogFan

Quote from: bennyl08 on July 30, 2017, 05:45:55 pm
Help me out here, because I'm not seeing the relevance here. To the use the analogy I made earlier, sounds like you are saying the study is incomplete because they didn't look at why the person was dehydrated, only that they were. I mean, players today are bigger and faster than yesterday's players without using steroids.

Perhaps there's a miscommunication here on what you mean by "incomplete". No single study will be able to cover everything. Thus, each are inherently incomplete. So, when I hear that, I assume the person is implying the study was inherently flawed and the results are meaningless. They forgot to account for something and the error is severe enough that the conclusions they come to can not actually be concluded from the research.

Perhaps you simply mean incomplete in that "there's a lot to look at here and looking at the rates of CTE between steroid users or not would be an interesting additional study".

That's exactly what I mean. CTE alone is an interesting study but that study probably needs to start with study groups at earlier ages and monitor their progression (through brain scans and the like) as they mature and continue to play, and study the addition of other factors that can effect the pace at which a player participates, how much they participate, do they enhance their size and performance by use of various PED's, etc, etc. Is there a family medical history of things that might contribute to the susceptibility of players to injury? I'm sure that there are other factors that might need to be considered that I am not remembering or adding, but this might be a good start at a more comprehensive, long term study that might provide additional and interesting results within different sets of control groups. What I am not saying is that the studies that have been done on CTE are lacking in value.
Go Hogs Go!

hogsanity

Quote from: MuskogeeHogFan on July 31, 2017, 10:06:49 am
That's exactly what I mean. CTE alone is an interesting study but that study probably needs to start with study groups at earlier ages and monitor their progression (through brain scans and the like) as they mature and continue to play, and study the addition of other factors that can effect the pace at which a player participates, how much they participate, do they enhance their size and performance by use of various PED's, etc, etc. Is there a family medical history of things that might contribute to the susceptability of players to injury? I'm sure that there are other factors that might need to be considered that I am not remembering or adding, but this might be a good start at a more comprehensive, long term study that might provide additional and interesting results within different sets of control groups. What I am not saying is that the studies that have been done on CTE are lacking in value.

But won't that type of study take decades? To me, it is pretty clear that people who have repetitive head rattling have a higher rate of cte than those that do not. Included in that is football, soccer, boxing and professional wrestling. All activities that result in repetitive sloshing of the brain inside the skull.  Is it wrong to inform people that CTE MAY be the outcome of prolonged participation in these activities? And, if after receiving this info, parents are more reluctant to let their kids play football, so what, that is their business not anyone else's.

And for all the over the top stuff about this is just people trying to end football, that is ridiculous. Football is not going anywhere because there is too much money at stake. From youth leagues that make a killing on gate fees, to high schools that take pride in having multi state championships and state of the art stadiums, to those small towns that get so much of their town pride from how the local team does, to the billions made by colleges and the nfl - FOOTBALL is not going anywhere.
People ask me what I do in winter when there is no baseball.  I will tell you what I do. I stare out the window, and I wait for spring.

"Anything goes wrong, anything at all, your fault, my fault, nobodies fault, I'm going to blow your head off."  John Wayne in BIG JAKE

MuskogeeHogFan

Quote from: hogsanity on July 31, 2017, 10:16:43 am
But won't that type of study take decades? To me, it is pretty clear that people who have repetitive head rattling have a higher rate of cte than those that do not. Included in that is football, soccer, boxing and professional wrestling. All activities that result in repetitive sloshing of the brain inside the skull.  Is it wrong to inform people that CTE MAY be the outcome of prolonged participation in these activities? And, if after receiving this info, parents are more reluctant to let their kids play football, so what, that is their business not anyone else's.

And for all the over the top stuff about this is just people trying to end football, that is ridiculous. Football is not going anywhere because there is too much money at stake. From youth leagues that make a killing on gate fees, to high schools that take pride in having multi state championships and state of the art stadiums, to those small towns that get so much of their town pride from how the local team does, to the billions made by colleges and the nfl - FOOTBALL is not going anywhere.

I didn't mention anything about anyone having an agenda to end football. I don't think that is the case.

Yes, a more in-depth study that took into consideration other potential contributing factors would indeed require decades.
Go Hogs Go!

hogsanity

Quote from: MuskogeeHogFan on July 31, 2017, 10:41:07 am
I didn't mention anything about anyone having an agenda to end football. I don't think that is the case.

Yes, a more in-depth study that took into consideration other potential contributing factors would indeed require decades.

Did not say YOU said that, but there are some in this thread, and anytime football safety comes up for that matter, that accuse people of trying to fundamentally change football.

And the fact that it will take decades to do these studies is part of the problem. The early evidence points to a relationship between football ( as well as soccer and boxing ) and CTE. That is all the public can go on for now because more in depth studies will take decades.
People ask me what I do in winter when there is no baseball.  I will tell you what I do. I stare out the window, and I wait for spring.

"Anything goes wrong, anything at all, your fault, my fault, nobodies fault, I'm going to blow your head off."  John Wayne in BIG JAKE

redneckfriend

Quote from: hogsanity on July 31, 2017, 10:16:43 am
But won't that type of study take decades? To me, it is pretty clear that people who have repetitive head rattling have a higher rate of cte than those that do not. Included in that is football, soccer, boxing and professional wrestling. All activities that result in repetitive sloshing of the brain inside the skull.  Is it wrong to inform people that CTE MAY be the outcome of prolonged participation in these activities? And, if after receiving this info, parents are more reluctant to let their kids play football, so what, that is their business not anyone else's.

And for all the over the top stuff about this is just people trying to end football, that is ridiculous. Football is not going anywhere because there is too much money at stake. From youth leagues that make a killing on gate fees, to high schools that take pride in having multi state championships and state of the art stadiums, to those small towns that get so much of their town pride from how the local team does, to the billions made by colleges and the nfl - FOOTBALL is not going anywhere.

You are exactly right. Although randomized studies should be started with available technology it would be a very long time before they provided anything definitive. The best hope for a quicker answer lies in specialized PET or MRI scans that could identify the lesions pre-mortem. So far they don't exist in clinical use but there was a report 4 years ago of a tau specific tracer. However it was used on only a very small number of former players and I don't know if it has been followed up with a larger study.

As far as football going anywhere that depends on kids continuing to play and parents allowing them to. The best way to give them piece of mind on that question is to have good information to make the decision. One problem with the JAMA study is that the headline is what grabs players and parents and, because the study wasn't randomized or controlled, when looked at more closely it is only suggestive. I'm not making a direct analogy but it has certain similarities to the panic among certain groups of mothers over vaccines- in the vaccine case there is no evidence at all for a correlation between vaccines and autism but when it is the health of your child even unfounded claims by scientific charlatans can gain traction. Since there is credible evidence for a relationship between head trauma and bad things later in life I expect this study could do a great deal of harm to football as a game- fewer people take it up and more quit early. More high schools, worried about liability, may drop the sport. It won't happen suddenly but perhaps faster than one might expect.

 

bennyl08

Quote from: MuskogeeHogFan on July 31, 2017, 10:06:49 am
That's exactly what I mean. CTE alone is an interesting study but that study probably needs to start with study groups at earlier ages and monitor their progression (through brain scans and the like) as they mature and continue to play, and study the addition of other factors that can effect the pace at which a player participates, how much they participate, do they enhance their size and performance by use of various PED's, etc, etc. Is there a family medical history of things that might contribute to the susceptibility of players to injury? I'm sure that there are other factors that might need to be considered that I am not remembering or adding, but this might be a good start at a more comprehensive, long term study that might provide additional and interesting results within different sets of control groups. What I am not saying is that the studies that have been done on CTE are lacking in value.

Okay, thanks for the clarification.

I agree that would be a good additional study to do. It would be very costly though and don't think this administration would be very keen to fund something like that and I doubt the NFL would fund it. However, I hope somebody is able to do something like you describe.

However, I also think it would behoove the general population to have something to work off of a bit sooner. That's the big issue with this right now. We know that there is this relatively newfound risk of CTE. However, we don't know what the exactly the risks of it are at the moment. So, we have the concern of current players playing without knowing what the risks are and the concern of a depletion of future players not willing to take the risk and the rule makers don't know enough to minimize the risks. While following a large sample for decades would be the most rigorous, in the meantime, to get some preliminary data at least, it might be good to try and sample a variety of people from all stages as well as a control group. Of course, that means getting people to donate their brains and such when they die which many people don't want to do. It's a big problem of data availability.
Quote from: PorkSoda on May 05, 2016, 09:24:05 pm
damn I thought it was only a color, didn't realize it was named after a liqueur. leave it to benny to make me research the history of chartreuse

hogsanity

Quote from: bennyl08 on July 31, 2017, 01:20:03 pm
Okay, thanks for the clarification.

I agree that would be a good additional study to do. It would be very costly though and don't think this administration would be very keen to fund something like that and I doubt the NFL would fund it. However, I hope somebody is able to do something like you describe.

However, I also think it would behoove the general population to have something to work off of a bit sooner. That's the big issue with this right now. We know that there is this relatively newfound risk of CTE. However, we don't know what the exactly the risks of it are at the moment. So, we have the concern of current players playing without knowing what the risks are and the concern of a depletion of future players not willing to take the risk and the rule makers don't know enough to minimize the risks. While following a large sample for decades would be the most rigorous, in the meantime, to get some preliminary data at least, it might be good to try and sample a variety of people from all stages as well as a control group. Of course, that means getting people to donate their brains and such when they die which many people don't want to do. It's a big problem of data availability.

Exactly. What are the risks if you start playing at age 7 and play through age 18? Are those risks greatly reduced by each year you wait to start playing? That is the kind of data that will some day be available, but for the foreseeable future it is not.
People ask me what I do in winter when there is no baseball.  I will tell you what I do. I stare out the window, and I wait for spring.

"Anything goes wrong, anything at all, your fault, my fault, nobodies fault, I'm going to blow your head off."  John Wayne in BIG JAKE

Kicking Wing

The appearance of the brain after death is meaningless if there is no corresponding data indicating early onset of dementia, an effect on motor skills, early death, etc. in the population.  Okay, so you found something by looking at their brains when nobody had a reason to look before.  What are the symptoms among the population of former players?

twistitup

Things are changing with players

http://bleacherreport.com/articles/2724914-martellus-bennett-on-players-cte-comments-i-aint-dying-for-this-s-t?utm_source=cnn.com&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=editorial

"John Urschel is 14th player to retire at age 30 or younger this offseason. Twenty players retired at 30 or younger during 2016 offseason."
How you gonna win when you ain't right within?

Here I am again mixing misery and gin....

twistitup

How you gonna win when you ain't right within?

Here I am again mixing misery and gin....

Pigsknuckles

This may be a step in the right direction. Will see use in the NFL this season. Pricey at about $1,500 each, but could pay huge future dividends.

https://www.digitaltrends.com/outdoors/vicis-zero1-performance-tests/
"the ox is slow, but the Earth is patient"

hogsanity

Quote from: Pigsknuckles on August 10, 2017, 02:13:45 pm
This may be a step in the right direction. Will see use in the NFL this season. Pricey at about $1,500 each, but could pay huge future dividends.

https://www.digitaltrends.com/outdoors/vicis-zero1-performance-tests/

Still is not going to stop the brain from banging into the skull due to sudden jarring hits, or sudden stops of the head via hitting the ground or another player. But at least they are trying to do what they can.
People ask me what I do in winter when there is no baseball.  I will tell you what I do. I stare out the window, and I wait for spring.

"Anything goes wrong, anything at all, your fault, my fault, nobodies fault, I'm going to blow your head off."  John Wayne in BIG JAKE