by Judy George: Complete Post through this link…
Repetitive impact predicted chronic traumatic encephalopathy in American football players.
Repetitive head-impact exposure in American tackle football was linked with chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a model based on helmet accelerometer data found.
Cumulative repetitive head impacts were associated with CTE status, CTE severity, and pathologic burden (all P<0.001) among brain donors who played football an average of 12.5 years, according to Dan Daneshvar, MD, PhD, of Harvard Medical School in Boston, and colleagues.
Concussion counts alone were not associated with CTE risk (P=0.23), Daneshvar and co-authors reported in Nature Communicationsopens in a new tab or window.
The findings support earlier data suggesting that head hits, not concussions, are tied to CTE, the researchers noted.
“These results provide added evidence that repeated non-concussive head injuries are a major driver of CTE pathology rather than symptomatic concussions, as the medical and lay literature often suggests,” said co-author Jesse Mez, MD, MS, of Boston University, in a statement.
