As generally happens when a football player sustains a serious injury, the question comes up: Is football too dangerous? The litmus test is the follow-up: would you let your child play the game?
Just last night we watched, horrified, as the medical team of the Buffalo Bills tried to restart Damar Hamlin’s heart after he collapsed on the field. And as expected, the controversy about the violent sport of football was reignited.
Studies have found high rates of concussions, traumatic brain injuries, and a serious brain disorder called chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) in former players. These injuries can have terribly debilitating effects.
Phillip Adams, George Andrie, Jovan Belcher, Forrest Blue, Colt Brennan, Nick Buoniconti, Lew Carpenter, Ronnie Caveness are among those who have been confirmed post-mortem, as having CTE.
Among the most well-known we find New York Giants Frank Gifford who won five NFL championships in the 1950s and 1960s. Though he died of natural causes, Gifford’s family released a statement in 2015 that confirmed a postmortem diagnosis of CTE. During 12 NFL seasons, Gifford made the Pro Bowl eight times at three different positions — defensive back, running back and flanker. But the image that lingered from his professional career was the violent tackle by Philadelphia Eagles linebacker Chuck Bednarik, another Hall of Famer, in 1960. The blow knocked out Gifford and forced him to sit out a season to fully recover.
In November of 2006, former Philadelphia Eagles defensive back Andre Waters went outside onto the pool deck of his Tampa home with a .32-caliber pistol and took his own life at the age of 44. “Football killed him,” Bennet Omalu, MD was quoted at the time after he had performed an examination on Waters’ brain. Omalu would also add that Waters’ brain tissue resembled that of an 85-year-old in the early stages of Alzheimer’s. “If Waters had lived another 10 to 15 years, he would’ve been fully incapacitated,” Omalu said in an article published in The New York Times.
Perhaps the most famous of these football “victims” is Aaron Hernandez. On April 19th, 2017, at approximately 3 a.m. the former New England Patriots tight end was found hanging from a bed sheet in his prison cell in Shirley, Massachusetts. Hernandez had recently been found not guilty of a 2012 double homicide on a technicality. A postmortem brain scan would later reveal that Hernandez had been suffering from CTE.
The scan which was performed by Ann McKee, PhD, lead researcher of the CTE Center at Boston University, showed evidence of brain atrophy, damage to the frontal lobe, and large portions of black spots created by tau proteins. “We’ve never seen this in our 468 brains, except in individuals some 20 years older,” Dr. McKee said in 2017. Hernandez also displayed all of the typical signs of CTE during his lifetime, including: changes in mood, depression, aggression, irritability, impulsivity, and anxiety, and suffered from constant headaches, migraines and memory problems.
To date, researchers have diagnosed CTE in 110 out of the 111 former NFL players who have donated their brains for study. This is the result of the damage that repeated concussions causes. For the 2017-2018 football season, the NFL changed certain rules to make play safer, but many have questioned whether this has made a dangerous game any safer. An article in AS in July affirmed that, “The league faces a complex problem with more and more former players showing signs of the devastating disease.”
As we saw last night, concussion is not the only medical problem that stems from football. The violent shocks repeatedly absorbed by the body of a player lead to many other consequences, and while what happened to Hamlin may have been somewhat of a medical fluke, the other injuries that they suffer from are anything but. This “fluke” that felled Hamlin is called commotio cordis. Sports medicine Doctor Brian Sutterer explains that it is a rare event: “essentially what can happen is, if you have a blunt trauma to the chest that occurs at exactly the right time in the cardiac electrical cycle, your heart can be sent into cardiac arrest.”
Orthopedists have pointed out that, “Given the size and speed of these athletes, it should be no surprise that football has the highest rate of injury of any other American sport. Most football injuries occur in the knee. The three most common types of injury are the MCL sprain, the meniscus tear and the ACL tear. And that doesn’t even take into consideration the grave damage from drugs and steroids whose use is widespread in the NFL.
With all this evidence that football is a dangerous sport, would you let your child play the game? Surprisingly, given its popularity at all age levels, the answer too frequently is yes. While some parents put their child’s safety first and say no, many others agree with the one who wrote, “Yes my child can play football I will explain that he could get hurt but I would never strip him of that opportunity”.
