Former New England Patriots tight end Aaron Hernandez, who committed suicide a week after being acquitted of double homicide, has been found to have had severe signs (original AP text) of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE). Hernandez's brain had been released to Boston University by his family for study. In 2015, Hernandez was found guilty for the murder of Odin Lloyd and automatically sentenced to life in prison without a possibility of parole:
Tests conducted on the brain of former football star Aaron Hernandez showed severe signs of the degenerative brain disease chronic traumatic encephalopathy, and his attorney said Thursday that the player's daughter is suing the NFL and the New England Patriots for leading Hernandez to believe the sport was safe.
In a news conference at his offices, Hernandez's attorney, Jose Baez, said the testing showed one of the most severe cases ever diagnosed. "We're told it was the most severe case they had ever seen for someone of Aaron's age," Baez said. Hernandez was 27 when he killed himself in April. Dr. Ann McKee, the director of the CTE Center at Boston University, concluded that the New England Patriots tight end had stage 3 of 4 of the disease and also had early brain atrophy and large perforations in a central membrane.
[...] A week before his suicide, Hernandez was acquitted in the 2012 drive-by shootings of two men in Boston. Prosecutors had argued that Hernandez gunned the two men down after one accidentally spilled a drink on him in a nightclub, and then got a tattoo of a handgun and the words "God Forgives" to commemorate the crime.
Baez said he deeply regretted not raising the issue of Hernandez's having CTE during his murder trials. He said the defense team did not blame CTE for the murders because Hernandez's defense was actual innocence.
Previously: NFL Acknowledges Link Between American Football and CTE
What if PTSD is More Physical Than Psychological?
Ailing NFL Players' Brains Show Signs of Neurodegenerative Disease
Related Stories
On Monday, the National Football League (NFL) publicly acknowledged for the first time the link between professional American football and degenerative brain disorders such as chronic traumatic encephalopathy. The league had long since admitted concussions were dangerous, but this is the first time long-term damage has been acknowledged. As recently as last month, long term damage had been denied. A 2012 study of the brains of deceased football players found that 34 out of 35 showed signs of damage.
The condition does not only affect football players, as athletes in rugby, boxing, ice hockey, association football (soccer), and wrestling are also at risk. CTE has been cited as a factor in the murder-suicides committed by football player Jovan Belcher and former WWE Champion Chris Benoit.
Will this admission impact our popular love of sports? Prior bad news had not impacted business:
"The news issues away from the field have had absolutely no impact. ... None," said John Wildhack, ESPN executive vice president for programming and production. "The NFL continues to have just an incredible grip on the American sports culture."
The New York Times Magazine published an article yesterday that asks exactly that question:
In early 2012, a neuropathologist named Daniel Perl was examining a slide of human brain tissue when he saw something odd and unfamiliar in the wormlike squiggles and folds. It looked like brown dust; a distinctive pattern of tiny scars. Perl was intrigued. At 69, he had examined 20,000 brains over a four-decade career, focusing mostly on Alzheimer's and other degenerative disorders. He had peered through his microscope at countless malformed proteins and twisted axons. He knew as much about the biology of brain disease as just about anyone on earth. But he had never seen anything like this.
The brain under Perl's microscope belonged to an American soldier who had been five feet away when a suicide bomber detonated his belt of explosives in 2009. The soldier survived the blast, thanks to his body armor, but died two years later of an apparent drug overdose after suffering symptoms that have become the hallmark of the recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan: memory loss, cognitive problems, inability to sleep and profound, often suicidal depression. Nearly 350,000 service members have been given a diagnosis of traumatic brain injury over the past 15 years, many of them from blast exposure. The real number is likely to be much higher, because so many who have enlisted are too proud to report a wound that remains invisible.
[Continues...]
The largest study of its kind has found damage in the vast majority of former football players' brains donated for research after they developed mental symptoms during life. Of 202 former players of the U.S. version of the game whose brains were examined, 87% showed the diagnostic signs of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a neurodegenerative disease associated with repetitive head trauma. Among former National Football League (NFL) players in the sample, that number jumped to 99%. The findings will likely ratchet up the pressure on leaders at all levels of football to protect their players. Still, the authors and other experts caution against overinterpreting the results, because the brains all came from symptomatic former players and not from those who remained free of mental problems.
"I think it is increasingly difficult to deny a link between CTE and repeated traumatic brain injury, be it through contact sports or other mechanisms," says Gil Rabinovici, a neurologist at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), who was not affiliated with the study.
The researchers, led by Boston University (BU) neuropathologist Ann McKee, used brains from a bank maintained by the VA Boston Healthcare System, BU, and the Concussion Legacy Foundation. They were donated by families of former football players. The team defines CTE, a diagnosis made only at autopsy, as "progressive degeneration associated with repetitive head trauma." The designation remains controversial with some, who call it a muddy diagnosis that doesn't include an iron-clad clinical course and the kind of clear-cut pathology that defines classical neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson's or Alzheimer's disease.
Clinicopathological Evaluation of Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy in Players of American Football (open, DOI: 10.1001/jama.2017.8334) (DX)
Aaron Hernandez's brain shows signs of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) with a severity beyond anything experts have ever seen in an athlete his age:
The Boston researcher who examined the brain of former football star Aaron Hernandez says it showed the most damage her team had seen in an athlete so young.
Hernandez, whose on-field performance for the New England Patriots earned him a $40 million contract in 2012, hanged himself in a prison cell earlier this year while serving a life sentence for murder. He was 27 years old.
Dr. Ann McKee, a neuropathologist who directs research of chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, at Boston University, said her research team found Hernandez had Stage 3 CTE and that they had never seen such severe damage in a brain younger than 46 years old. McKee announced her findings at medical conference on Thursday in Boston where she spoke publicly for the first time.
The researchers described the brain as one of the most significant contributions to their work due to the former athlete's young age at the time of his death. Also at the Boston Herald.
In other news, a lawsuit by the estate of Aaron Hernandez (filed while Hernandez was alive) against a prison phone service has been thrown out:
The identity of a hacker who accessed jailhouse conversations between Aaron Hernandez and his fiancee while he was awaiting trial will likely never be revealed now that a judge has spiked the former Patriot's lawsuit against the phone service hired to record and store non-privileged calls.
Suffolk Superior Court Judge Helene Kazanjian entered her judgment Monday allowing Texas-based Securus Technologies Inc.'s motions to dismiss Hernandez's complaint. It was initially filed in federal court last year, five months before Hernandez hanged himself in his cell at the Souza-Baranowski Correctional Center in Shirley. Hernandez's estate was pushing forward with the civil action.
Did American football create a murderer and drive him to suicide?
Previously: NFL Acknowledges Link Between American Football and CTE
Ailing NFL Players' Brains Show Signs of Neurodegenerative Disease
Former Football Star Aaron Hernandez's Brain Found to Have Severe CTE
Abnormal Levels of a Protein Linked to C.T.E.[*] Found in N.F.L Players' Brains, Study Shows
Experimental brain scans of more than two dozen former N.F.L. players found that the men had abnormal levels of the protein linked to chronic traumatic encephalopathy, the degenerative brain disease associated with repeated hits to the head.
Using positron emission tomography, or PET, scans, the researchers found "elevated amounts of abnormal tau protein" in the parts of the brain associated with the disease, known as C.T.E., compared to men of similar age who had not played football.
The authors of the study and outside experts stressed that such tau imaging is far from a diagnostic test for C.T.E., which is likely years away and could include other markers, from blood and spinal fluid.
The results of the study, published in The New England Journal of Medicine on Wednesday [DOI: 10.1056/NEJMoa1900757] [DX], are considered preliminary, but constitute a first step toward developing a clinical test to determine the presence of C.T.E. in living players, as well as early signs and potential risk.
[*] CTE: Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy
Also at NBC.
Editorial: Links in the Chain of Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (DOI: 10.1056/NEJMe1903746) (DX)
Related: NFL Acknowledges Link Between American Football and CTE
What if PTSD is More Physical Than Psychological?
Ailing NFL Players' Brains Show Signs of Neurodegenerative Disease
Former Football Star Aaron Hernandez's Brain Found to Have Severe CTE
Researchers: Aaron Hernandez Had the Worst Case of CTE Ever Seen in an Athlete So Young
CTE Can be Diagnosed in a Living Person
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 22 2017, @05:37PM (6 children)
The only thing that comes to mind is that I wouldn't want my kids playing football.
Football is just blunt trauma with some sport tacked on for legitimacy.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by DeathMonkey on Friday September 22 2017, @05:39PM
Blunt trauma that might contribute to becoming a murderous thug, apparently.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by DannyB on Friday September 22 2017, @06:40PM (4 children)
I wouldn't want my kid playing football either. Not only because of the likely potential of injury. But because I don't want them to be a bad person. Admitted, I may have a warped view. But I see football players as the people who torment people studying math and computers, stuffing them in lockers, etc.
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 22 2017, @07:25PM (3 children)
I watched that movie, too. Didn't the team captain also save the world and become friends with the nerdy kid?
FWIW, I took night classes right after HS football practice. I ended up finishing multivariable calculus (Calc III) before graduating.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 22 2017, @07:46PM
... were it not for all that head trauma you received.
Now you're just plain old above-average.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by DannyB on Friday September 22 2017, @08:14PM (1 child)
I honestly don't know what movie you mean. But I'm sure this kind of thing has made it into movies and TV shows.
My real life memory of high school football players, was that they are real pricks. Maybe my experience isn't typical. But I strongly suspect it is very typical. Maybe less so today than four decades ago.
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.
(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 22 2017, @08:33PM
The fact is many teen-aged boys are assholes.
Enough of them are well-developed physically to become bullies.
By chance, in the US those same assholes will be part of the football team because they fit the physical profile.
Afterwards, there's team-building stuff, and it can happen that the entire team behave like assholes, just to fit in.
But I think you're being unfair when generalizing to "football players are assholes".
My particular experience was that "soccer" and basketball players are assholes, because i grew up in Europe.
But if I try to judge all the team members fairly 20 years later, most of them were ok-ish.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Friday September 22 2017, @05:37PM (2 children)
So he was accused of 3 murders but acquitted of 2 of them? And, he was serving life for the 1?
The story link seem to assume we've been following this story so I didn't see much clarification...
Now back to your regularly scheduled hand-egg jokes.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 22 2017, @06:26PM
IIRC it was a gay love triangle. NTTAWWT.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday September 22 2017, @08:06PM
How are you confused if you stated it perfectly in the first line?
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(Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 22 2017, @05:50PM (7 children)
The player's daughter should return the millions of dollars in the family fortune to the NFL and the New England Patriots, since the pampered lifestyle of luxury and endless wealth she now enjoys was obviously an error.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 22 2017, @06:03PM (5 children)
The daughter is 5, and I'm sure she would trade whatever money you might imagine to have her father back you insensitive clod. When I think of a young child growing up without support of her daddy I weep grown-man tears.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 22 2017, @06:36PM (4 children)
Do you think this story is actually "5 year old sues the NFL for father's death" or "ambulance chasing lawyers take advantage of grieving child to pursue legal battle with poor chance of success to gain media attention for the law firm"?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by DeathMonkey on Friday September 22 2017, @06:48PM (3 children)
If the NFL lied about the dangers then they deserve to be punished.
Characterizing the prosecution as "ambulance chasing lawyers" is argumentum ad-hominem.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 22 2017, @06:58PM (2 children)
If anybody needs the NFL to tell them that slamming their heads into other dudes and sloshing their brains around is bad for them, they're probably the same idiots warning labels on boxes of cigarettes are still there for. It's honestly not a secret, some people are just willing to suffer brain damage for millions of dollars. Or stupid already, in which case nothing of value was lost.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 22 2017, @09:09PM (1 child)
Ah yes, the specter of "personal responsibility" rears its head. It is a seductive philosophy that lets you forget about humanity's problems because 95% of the problems get to be blamed on the victim for not making better choices. Sadly this philosophy ignores that few people are equipped to assess all the dangers Life can throw at them, and will 99% of the time accept the "wisdom" of doctors / experts. "We've done studies, the equipment protects you!" Like cigarette companies saying there is no link between smoking and lung cancer. It is only a modern revelation that YES smoking is 100% bad for you!! I'm assuming you're young and thus spew such infantile "wisdom".
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 23 2017, @03:05AM
the military.
Plenty of the same shit goes on, and plenty of head bashing, face slamming, and god only knows what kind of chemicals that the military puts in them.
That said, some people, due to their upbringing or simply who they are, only fit in if given an outlet like football or the military where they can be as violent as is acceptable and hopefully never fall back into full-time 'civilian' life.
(Score: 2) by realDonaldTrump on Saturday September 23 2017, @08:10AM
See, we don’t go by these new and very much softer NFL rules. Concussion? Oh, got a little ding on the head, no, no you can't play for the rest of the season. Our people are tough! 🇺🇸
(Score: -1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 22 2017, @06:59PM
About the negative impact of a stupid game. Yawn.
Film at 11.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by epitaxial on Friday September 22 2017, @07:48PM (3 children)
Am I supposed to feel sorry for this murdering piece of shit? He literally won the lottery by landing a big NFL contract but couldn't stop himself from doing dumb ghetto gangster shit.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday September 22 2017, @08:10PM (2 children)
The handegg made him do it.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 23 2017, @12:41AM (1 child)
What, you mean like someone said to him "You chicken?" and then a cohort of the questioner played a short audio sample of a bawking chicken, implying that he, the alpha-male football player were roosting on a handegg? And then he blew up and went all Mad Dog on the poor suckers?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by sjames on Saturday September 23 2017, @04:13AM
More like his brain was damaged until the impulse control and sense of proportion that makes most of us not do that sort of thing was disabled. He may honestly not even know why he killed someone, not unlike when you ask a small child why he hit someone when he knows it's wrong.
I doubt very much the NFL was truthful with him about that possible outcome since it is known to have been covering up that particular set of risks.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 22 2017, @08:43PM
So yeah, this is your brain on drugs - see this public safety announcement.
This is your brain on football: depression, reckless behavior, wife murdering, gambling, friend murdering, memory loss, did I say murdering?. Suicide.
Don't take drugs.