CTE: Brain Disease Found In 87 Deceased NFL Players

Researchers at the Department of Veterans Affairs and Boston University have examined 165 deceased football players, 91 of them being former National Football League players, and their findings are staggering.

Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, commonly known as CTE, was found in 79 percent of all the brains examined, with 96 percent of NFL players' brains having evidence of the disease. All in all, 131 of the 165 brains of individuals who played football, collegiality, semi-professionally, or professionally, were found to have CTE, according to PBS.

CTE was first discovered by Dr. Bennet Omalu in 2005, and resulted in the subsequent clash between Omalu and the National Football League. The events are now the subject of the upcoming film, Concussion.

In the study, forty percent of the positive results were players who had played offensive and defensive line, where contact is made on every play in a game, which supports previous findings that consistent contact and minor head trauma result in the highest risk of development of CTE.

Recently, signs of CTE have been identified in living players through brain scans, but CTE can only be definitively identified posthumously. Additionally, research has been somewhat skewed, as the majority of brain donors had suspected that they had the disease prior to their deaths.

Despite this, the numbers are "remarkably consistent" with past research from the center suggesting a link between football and long-term brain disease, according to Dr. Ann McKee, the director and chief of neuropathology at the VA Boston Healthcare System.

"People think that we're blowing this out of proportion, that this is a very rare disease and that we're sensationalizing it," said McKee. "My response is that where I sit, this is a very real disease. We have had no problem identifying it in hundreds of players." 

This research coincided with the NFL's recent ability boast a large amount of progress in reducing head injuries in the league. Concussions in the regular season have dropped 35 percent since 2012, from 173 to 112, according to the 2015 Health and Safety Report.

McKee stated that the most challenging part of the work is "convincing people this is an actual disease." The results of new cases of CTE continue to surface in her work.

"People want to make this just Alzheimer's disease or aging and not really a disease," McKee said. "I think there's fewer of those people, but that's still one of our major hurdles."

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