Traumatic Brain Injury In Football
This discovery highlighted the potential long-term impact the exposure to mild traumatic brain injuries, common to NFL players, can have. Furthermore, as more research about the correlation between playing football and developing CTE has been conducted this research aims to investigate how the NFL administration and players have addressed this safety
According CNN’s article “NFL Concussion Fun Facts,” there have been 692 combined concussions diagnosed throughout the preseason and regular season in the NFL over the past 3 years. It may be evident by these numbers that the NFL has a major problem with players getting concussions, and over the years their concussion protocol has been questioned by former players and other people around the football community. Ken Belson stated in his article “Brain Trauma to Affect One in Three Players, N.F.L. Agrees,“ that a third of retired football players are subject to long term brain issues, these issues may include the disease known as CTE (chronic traumatic encephalopathy) which has been brought to light in a more recent time. CTE has effected a good
Brian’s Song Essay (Football Concussions) Imagine you just hit the turf really hard in a football game. This is one way of getting a severe concussion which could lead to 2 weeks with no light. Concussions are a major problem in football and it needs to be fixed.
Ronnie Contrata Period 9 Deep bruises, sprained and broken bones, torn muscles, and strained tendons are some of the injuries that Brett Favre, one of the most famous and successful football quarterbacks of all time, has endured throughout his career. But the most dangerous and life-impacting injuries he has had were concussions. Because of this, Favre is now a leader for safer play and new technology for football and other sports leagues. The NFL and other leagues have made some changes to try to diagnose concussions but not really to prevent them.
An NFL football player will endure somewhere between 900 to 1500 blows to their head over the course of a single season. With an immense amount of blows like this comes an immense amount of damage to a player’s brain. This extensive amount of brain damage has been decided, by Dr. Bennet Omalu, to result in chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE. Over the course of these discoveries and much controversy, the NFL has been targeted, denied all accusations, done very few things to lessen the risk of concussions in football, and the risks and number of concussions have steadily increased throughout the league’s
Some of the tests revealed damage to the amygdala which controls mood. Additionally the NFL players scored much lower on memory tests, and had worse verbal skills (Hedin, 2015) 5. Due to the recent number of suicides & violent crimes committed by former players, there is more of a need to research the correlation between the head injuries in the NFL and brain disease even more C. Thesis Point 3: What steps the National Football league has taken to protect players long term health and safety 1. With the scrutiny the NFL has come under, they have developed a new protocol for the diagnoses and treatment of players with concussions 2. Under the new protocol, any player who exhibits sings of a concussion, even the most remote sign, must come out of the game and be checked out by the medical staff, they may not return to the same game if they undergo tests for concussion.
Have you ever thought that a sport is too dangerous, but others think it isn’t too dangerous. Football has too many long-term effects, facts that people may not know about football, and after you get a concussion, it is more common for you to get many more concussions after the first one. Therefore, football is too dangerous for these following reasons. First, there are too many long term effects in football. Concussions may be short, but if you have a lot of concussions it could cause you to kill yourself.
Once a professional athlete has experienced a severe concussion they are required to take a neuropsychological test. Neuropsychological tests are assessments of cognitive given to measure psychological brain-functioning skills to professional football athletes to determine if they are qualified to return to play for the season. Once a athlete has experienced at least one concussion, they are twice as likely to receive more. Brain trauma affect one in three football athletes. To be more specific receivers, quarterbacks, defensive backers, special teams and corners are the players who experience the most concussions.
Concussions themselves are a controversial topic simply because of their destructive forces on the lives of everyone, ranging from people who tripped and fell a little too hard, to people who make a career of hitting other people as hard as they possibly can. There are many people opposed to the idea of football’s inherent violence, yet advocates of the sport claim that removing the factor of colliding would make a completely different sport that cannot even be called football, which itself has become so ingrained in American society that it practically owns a day of the week from Week One of preseason to the closing seconds of the Superbowl. The fact remains though that if football were to suddenly cease existing, many people would be jobless,
Many different investigations were started in order to connect CTE (Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy) to football. These investigations succeeded, even though some took longer to be recognized due to the fact of how important American football is to the U.S.A., but nonetheless it was known that NFL players were at a high risk for CTE and the only way to fix it is to stop playing football. During studies like the NFL case in 2002, there was a big riot about NFL and how it impacts the football fans, but they never focused on how the injuries start to stack up into CTE. The scientists that focus towards the beginning of a football athletes rate of concussions start to see the a distortion in the brain. Scientists like Dr. Christopher Whitlow, who did an experiment on 25 boys around mid teens and used helmets to record brain activity while playing football.
Dr. Frank Conidi analyzed the brains of 40 former NFL football players who averaged seven years in the league, and had been retired from the league for less than five years. All had brain images using sophisticated MRI, and 43% showed that the white matter of the brain had damage, which is responsible for attaching the nerve cells among separate regions. The length of the damage has been just enough to be classified as traumatic brain injury. Thirty percent showed derangement that neurons used to interact with each other- compromised connections is one of the leading causes of many brain disorders and is the first sign of bad brain health (Alice Park). Conidi has found out that the more years a player plays in the NFL, the more likely he was to show symptoms of the disease TBI.
Anyone who has had a brain injury in the past needs to be aware of the symptoms of CTE, not only for themselves, but also for the people around them. Football causes about ten times the amount of significant brain injuries compared to other popular sports (What). A sport with as much violence as football needs to be taken seriously. Children who are not aware of the consequences and the magnitude of the injuries they can sustain need to be protected.
The long-term side effects of these traumatic injuries have led spectators and doctors to speculate the dangers of head on collision in sports. Furthermore, concussions lead to TBI which leads to depression and problems with their functioning. Brain injuries have led to famous NFL players committing suicide and losing their families and
Concussions are one of the most debated and controversial topics within the National Football League (NFL) today. During the time of Madonna doing her thing and the Reagan Administration in control medical professionals began to notice the dangers of concussions and the long-term effects of CTE. That has been a long standing problem within the NFL but has remained unaddressed until recently. Now days the conflict grabbed the attention of the media, the players, the fans, among others. Early in the league's history, players and coaches were not aware of the potential dangers and the possible long-term effects concussions could have on the players' brains.
An article in “The Week” magazine states that in a recent study about 95% of NFL players that have died due to illness were in fact victims of the football related degenerative disease called chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) (“Should Kids Play Football?” 3). CTE is a found in people who receive repetitive blows to the head, and results in memory loss, social instability, erratic behavior, and unfortunately death. CTE is the most commonly found in retired football players more than any other sport. Not to mention, CTE can affect people of all ages, so it is important to be mindful of the acts you let your child participate in. Including CTE many other diseases have been found to stem from playing football.
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