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A newly published study on former NFL players’ brains has found that nearly a quarter, at minimum, who died over a recent six-year period had a progressive degenerative brain disease that’s caused by repeated blows to the head and traumatic brain injuries.
The study on chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) published on Tuesday in the peer-reviewed medical journal BMJ concluded that NFL players have a “higher prevalence of CTE at death than has been previously shown in multiple community based studies.”
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“Furthermore, these data indicate that CTE severity at death is significantly associated with dementia in NFL player brain donors, and that dementia is common in these donors,” the study states.
This conclusion follows researchers examining 235 brains of 878 former players who died from 2016 to 2021. Of those brains, made available through donation, 215 or 91% were diagnosed with CTE, which can only be definitively diagnosed after death. This equated to a minimum prevalence of 24.5% of CTE at death for all decedents.
Randy Grimes, 66, who played center for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers from 1983 to 1992 and runs a nonprofit that counsels retired athletes, said more attention is needed.
“It’s not something that’s brought up, it’s not something that players want to talk about,” he told The New York Times. “We probably could move forward faster in our research if we did talk more about it. But players don’t want to do it. They don’t want to think they have it, they don’t want to think they’re seeing it. Deep down, we all know that probably the majority of us are going to have some form of C.T.E.”
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