The brain and CTE

During the fall many Americans spend their Saturdays and Sundays in front of the big screen watching football. This includes myself, my family, and my friends. Every time we watch there is a moment when we will say "wow that was a brutal, I don't know how he's still in the game." I just watched Chris Nowinski's ted talk called "Can I have your brain? The quest for truth on concussion and CTE" and I think this wow moment we have relates back to his research. Being such a big football fan, this research although frightening has always been interesting to me. 

A little background information, Chris was a football player for Harvard University. After his playing career he joined the WWE, entertainment wrestling, where he suffered a concussion. He retired from the WWE due to his constant headaches, sleep deprivation and depression, all symptoms of post-concussion syndrome. Due to his injury he started doing research and found that it went way deeper than concussions. What he started learning about was a disease called chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a very traumatic brain injury where much more research is needed. Chris looked at the stories of Mike Webster, Terry Long and Andre Waters, the movie Concussion starring Will Smith really does a good job telling the stories of these three NFL players. The problem with gathering research on CTE was the availability of brains, so he decided to start the Concussion Legacy Foundation. This Foundation teamed up with Boston University and the Boston VA to continue research on CTE. After years of having to call deceased families to get brains, people have now started calling the foundation asking to donate their brains to science. As Chris mentioned in the video they have over 2500 brain donations to date. 

What is really concerning is the research that Chris and his colleagues have found. Out of the first 111 pro football player brains they studied, 110 were positive for CTE. In relation out of the first 53 college football players 48 were positive for CTE. This is very frightening and speaks to the violence we see in football.

In class, I have started learning about the brain, what it controls, what its functions are, and how it controls the rest of our body. This research is very frightening considering their really is so much unknown about CTE and how it damages the brain. What we do know is that CTE is a degenerative brain disease caused by repetitive brain trauma. As we know from our studies on traumatic brain injuries, they can result in cognitive and personality changes. In particular our brain has a brain stem, cerebellum and 4 lobes, frontal, temporal, occipital, and parietal. An injury to our frontal lobe can produce attention deficits and uncontrollable emotional, social and sexual behaviors. In an injury to the temporal lobe we could see increased aggressive behaviors, difficulty understanding spoken language and short-term memory loss. Damage to the occipital lobe can result in hallucinations and visual impairments and damage to the parietal lobe is going to cause sensational and perceptual issues. The cerebellum is going to impair our movements if damaged and damage to our brain stem will effect our basic life functions such as sleeping, eating and breathing. As more research is continued to be done it will be interesting to see how much it relates to a traumatic brain injury and what parts of the brain it is more likely to damage.  

Citation:

Nowinski, C. (2017, November). Chris Nowinski: Can I have your brain? The quest for truth on concussions and CTE. Retrieved from https://www.ted.com/talks/chris_nowinski_can_i_have_your_brain_a_quest_for_truth_on_concussions_cte