On a cool and rainy afternoon during the first week of classes at Centennial High School in this well-to-do Baltimore suburb, about 50 members of the boys’ cross-country team sauntered across the parking lot for their after-school run.
Research on 202 former football players found evidence of a brain disease linked to repeated head blows in nearly all of them, from athletes in the National Football League, college and even high school. It’s the largest update on chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, a debilitating brain disease that can cause a range of symptoms including memory loss.
In the trailer for the movie “Concussion,” star Will Smith says: “I found a disease that no one has ever seen.” It’s a claim the real-life doctor portrayed by Smith, forensic pathologist Bennet Omalu, has himself made for years, giving a detailed description about how he came to name that disease “chronic traumatic encephalopathy.” But Omalu neither discovered the disease nor named it, according to scientific journals and brain researchers who were interviewed by The Associated Press. And though no…
“Concussion” delivers a hard hit to the NFL as it deals with data linking repeated blows to the heads of its players to dementia and a host of other problems. The league’s rocky dealings with Dr. Bennet Omalu, who identified a degenerative disease in football players known as CTE, or chronic traumatic encephalopathy, are the focus of the movie’s second hour. Starring Will Smith and Alec Baldwin, “Concussion” had its premiere Tuesday night at AFI Fest in Hollywood. Among the…
The National Football League said Saturday it will help fund new research on the suspected link between sports-related concussions and long-term brain degeneration. The agreement with the London-based International Concussion and Head Injury Research Foundation will focus on retired jockeys, who suffer far greater rates of brain trauma than even football players. The agreement came during daylong talks convened by the NFL in London involving representatives of 15 sports leagues, including the National Hockey League and World Rugby. The panel…