{"id":595580,"date":"2026-08-25T14:28:09","date_gmt":"2026-08-25T14:28:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/595580\/"},"modified":"2026-08-25T14:28:09","modified_gmt":"2026-08-25T14:28:09","slug":"at-least-one-in-four-former-nfl-players-in-study-suffered-from-degenerative-brain-disease-cte-nfl","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/595580\/","title":{"rendered":"At least one in four former NFL players in study suffered from degenerative brain disease CTE | NFL"},"content":{"rendered":"

At least one in four former NFL players who died between 2016 and 2021 was found to have had chronic \u2060traumatic encephalopathy<\/a> (CTE), according to a study released on Tuesday.<\/p>\n

Out of the 878 former players who died during that time frame, 235 donated their brains for study, researchers said, with 215 \u2060of those donated brains \u2060found to have CTE, \u200ba degenerative disease that can only definitively be diagnosed after death. CTE is associated with repeated blows to the head, including concussions. Symptoms include<\/a> difficulty with attention and memory, dementia, mood disorders and headaches.<\/p>\n

An NFL<\/a> spokesperson said: \u201cThe NFL continuously strives to make the game of football safer, including by implementing \u2060strategies to reduce concussions and head impacts.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe NFL remains committed to ensuring that the NFL community has access to a robust \u2013 and expanding \u2013 set of resources to enhance their physical and \u2060mental well being.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe encourage former players to utilize these resources to identify and seek treatment when they are concerned about \u200btheir health.\u201c<\/p>\n

The study\u2019s lead author Daniel Daneshvar, the chair \u200cof physical medicine and rehabilitation \u200cat Mass General Brigham and an associate professor at Harvard Medical School, said that repeated traumatic brain injuries are \u200ca known factor in elevated rates of neurodegenerative disease.<\/p>\n

\u201cSimilarly, we and others have shown that in NFL players, specifically, there is about a four times higher rate of death from neurodegenerative disease than the general population,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n

The study from Mass General Brigham, Boston University and the Concussion + CTE Foundation also found dementia was common among brain donors, with researchers urging prevention measures that focus on cutting down on repetitive head impacts across all levels \u200cof the sport.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe bulk of the head impacts that these former NFL players experienced didn\u2019t occur at the NFL level. They occurred at the collegiate level \u2026 and at the high school \u200blevel and in many cases the youth level. And all of those cumulative hits to the head added up to result in an increased risk,\u201d Daneshvar said.<\/p>\n

A number of high-profile NFL players who took their own lives \u2013 including Junior Seau, Dave Duerson and Aaron Hernandez \u2013 were found to have had CTE when their brains were analyzed after their deaths.<\/p>\n

The NFL\u2019s 2011 collective bargaining agreement limited the number of contact practices during the season. The Ivy League banned full-contact tackling during practices five years later.<\/p>\n

The US supreme court cleared the way for the NFL\u2019s settlement of \u2060concussion-related lawsuits with thousands of retired players in 2016.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf the changes that have been \u200bimplemented at the NFL level, including reducing \u200bthe amount of contact in sports practices \u200bto less than one per week, were propagated at the collegiate, high school, and youth \u200blevels, athletes would be \u200cbetter off,\u201d said Daneshvar, \u200bwho urged current and former \u200bathletes experiencing cognitive symptoms to seek a neurodegenerative disease expert evaluation.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe know that nearly 70% of head impacts are occurring in practice. So without changing a single minute of game time at any of those levels, we can be substantially reducing the cumulative head impact burden that these individuals are experiencing throughout their lives.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"At least one in four former NFL players who died between 2016 and 2021 was found to have…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":595581,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[85,46,105],"class_list":["post-595580","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-sports","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/595580","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=595580"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/595580\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/595581"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=595580"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=595580"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=595580"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}