This sidebar accompanies the article "Quintiles Inks 5-Year Deal With NFL To Track Injury Data"
The medical welfare of professional athletes has come under scrutiny in recent years, and none more that of players in the National Football League. Over the last 20 years, the neurological consequences of the full contact sport have garnered the most attention.
Sadly, high-profile suicides of former players such as former San Diego Chargers linebacker, Junior Seau, have been major drivers tension between the league and the NFL Players Association. Upon autopsy, Seau's brain was found to have the pathological hallmarks of a distinct class of neurological disease known as CTE.
Chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), first described in 1920's boxers as "punch-drunk" syndrome or "dementia pugilistica," is the progressive degeneration of brain function as a result of repeated, closed head injuries, now recognized to occur in professional football players even years after retirement from the sport.
The CTE Center at Boston University is the top independent, academic center specifically devoted to understanding how the disease develops after repetitive, traumatic brain injury. The disease originally presents as memory loss, confusion, and disruption of gait and balance, but then proceeds to dementia and aggressive behavior, with depression and suicidal ideation sometimes present.
In 2009, the most comprehensive analysis (PDF) of such brain injury cases among professional athletes was published by CTE Center physicians in the Journal of Neuropathology and Experimental Neurology.
Initially, CTE could only be diagnosed at autopsy. But neurology researchers at the University of California-Los Angeles showed in 2013 that brain damage consistent with CTE could be detected by PET scanning in some living, retired NFL players. (View UCLA video from that story below)
The attention on CTE led to an NFL settlement in 2013 that provides $765 million in medical help for players suffering from severe neurological diseases such as Alzheimer's disease of amyotropic lateral sclerosis (ALS). Players with a CTE diagnosis are eligible for up to $4 million in medical awards.
