New figures were released by Boston University this week about the real risks of football — and it’s not just bad knees. The sport is taking a horrible toll on most of its players. The extent of that price was made clear Monday in new figures released by the Boston University CTE Center. Via Boston University:
According to its latest report, the CTE Center has diagnosed 345 former NFL players with chronic traumatic encephalopathy, out of 376 former players who were studied, a rate of 91.7 percent. Two retired players from the two teams facing off in Super Bowl LVII on Sunday—the Kansas City Chiefs and the Philadelphia Eagles—were among those diagnosed with CTE in the last year. Those ex-players are one-time Eagles quarterback Rick Arrington, who played for them from 1970 to ’73, and former Chiefs defensive tackle Ed Lothamer, who played for two of their Super Bowl teams.
To put those numbers in perspective, a 2018 BU study of 164 brains of men and women donated to the Framingham Heart Study found that only 1 of 164 (less than 1 percent) showed signs of the progressive degenerative brain disease. And that lone CTE case? A former college football player.
The players “feel invincible, at the top of the game, and I understand that and the power that must hold over them,” says Ann McKee, director of the BU CTE Center and chief of neuropathology at VA Boston Healthcare System. “But they are just unfortunately not living with the real risks of the disease. It makes me sad.”
