by Saurabh Jha
Footballers are at risk of brain damage, specifically a neurodegenerative disease known as chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE). CTE was described in a football player by forensic pathologist, Bennet Omalu, who performed an autopsy on Michael Webster, a former Pittsburgh Steeler. Webster died of a heart attack but had a rapid and mysterious cognitive decline. Webster’s brain appeared normal at first. When Omalu used a special technique, he found a protein, known as tau, in the brain.
Omalu’s discovery inspired the movie Concussion in which Will Smith plays the pathologist. The Fresh Prince plays convincingly a god-fearing, soft-spoken but brilliant physician, who is up against incredulous colleagues and the National Football League (NFL). The NFL clearly has a lot to lose from Omalu’s discovery. However, the director’s attempt to emulate The Insider, where big tobacco tailgates the scientist, fails at many levels.
This is not just because the NFL is not really Big Tobacco. The NFL is adept at playing to the gallery. Recently, it carried a pink logo to increase awareness of breast cancer. The NFL could have chosen prostate cancer. But solidarity with sisters is better PR than showing solidarity with brothers.
The reason why Concussion fails to ignite memories of Big Tobacco is that there is still a lot we don’t know about CTE, or the precise risks of banging one’s head. Some who play contact sports develop CTE, but many are unaffected. CTE has also been reported in people who haven’t had concussive injuries.
Omalu’s discovery has predictably touched our inner sanctum of social justice. Some want college football to be banned. Pitchforks have been raised full mast against the NFL. A narrative has developed in which the rich, greedy and unethical NFL conscripts young, hapless, unsuspecting men from poor families to inevitable brain damage. Righteous indignation is especially delicious when backed by science.
But the science is unsettled, and public policy is even more complicated. For many young men from poor backgrounds, football is their entry to higher education. I suspect such kids would prefer to keep this route open, rather than be fodder for the liberal conscience of the more affluent.
After watching Concussion I tried conjuring images of greedy capitalists polluting local water supplies, but just couldn’t because while the NFL is mega-rich, its players aren’t exactly paupers.
If football is banned I, for one, shall not shed a tear. It is a hideous sport, better suited to the arena of Emperor Commodus. It is strategically barren but packed with jargon giving a pretense of strategy. I’d rather watch cows grazing, than the Super Bowl.
But banning sports on health grounds is a thin end of a very steep wedge. All sports are risky. Tennis players can damage their knees and shoulders. Skiers can mangle their ankles. I’ve seen a fractured nose in a table tennis player (he lost the game, incidentally). Even cricket, the only civilized game on this planet, has recorded the odd fatality.
The riskiest activity, though, is lack of activity. America’s public health problem is obesity, not concussion. Kids need more reasons to get on the field, not excuses to stay off it.
The calls for moderation, so that football is less gratuitously brutal, are reasonable. I doubt asking players to be nicer to their opponents will work. Specific acts should be fouls. I still can’t understand why football – a game where the feet only occasionally touches the ball – is called football. But, correct me if I’m wrong, the head is not an instrument in this game, just an innocent bystander.
There’s a risk of CTE in other sports, too. In soccer, I mean the real football, players often head the ball – hurtling it by some distance. I doubt heading the ball will ever be illegal in professional soccer, or youth soccer outside the US. The Europeans and South Americans are less risk-averse than their frontier cousins. And the game can’t be played with the feet alone. If Diego Maradona had been forbidden from using his head, as well as his hands, he would have credited the Argentinian victory over England to the “Head of God.”
There’s a lot of money in social justice. The push for more safety is someone’s entrepreneurial opportunity. There are helmets that measure the impact of head collisions in football. These helmets may, one day, become mandatory, making their manufacturers very rich. One day analysts will use information from these force-recording helmets to derive minute by minute precise, but unverifiable, risk of brain damage. Player stats will include height, weight, home runs – or is that baseball? I can’t recall – and an index of brain damage.
As awareness of risk of concussions increases, some might blame a whole host of symptoms, and behavioral issues, on bumping their head. There is an entity known as post-concussive syndrome (PCS), characterized by headaches, irritability and difficulty concentrating. These symptoms are so vague that anyone can have them on a bad day. I’m irritable (and irritating) most days, but especially after a holiday.
Bennet Omalu is ready to bet his medical license that OJ Simpson has CTE, raising suspicion that OJ’s alleged homicide of his alleged ex-wife was because of alleged CTE. Incidentally, OJ has written a book about a hypothetical murder he did not commit. If he has CTE, it clearly permits a high level of mental functioning. Perhaps I need to bang my head a few times in order to finish the book that I have been procrastinating over interminably.
With concussions we could enter extremely dodgy territories. Violence, to give one example, perpetrated by sports personalities could be blamed on brain damage from concussion which, too subtle to be seen on computed tomography and magnetic resonance imaging, will need more sophisticated imaging, whose validity is far from proven.
More troubling than overdiagnosis – i.e. giving someone a disease when none exists – is misattribution. Many veterans have concussions. Veterans also suffer from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). The symptoms of PTSD and PCS are similar. Falsely ascribing symptoms of PTSD to PCS can deprive veterans of proper psychiatric care.
This is not to say that CTE isn’t real. It clearly is. Nevertheless, there’s a lot we don’t know about CTE. It’ll take time to accrue the corpus of knowledge. Till then we must keep our righteous indignation, and angst against the NFL, at bay. Alternatively, just watch cricket.
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Saurabh Jha is a new 3 Quarks Daily columnist. He is an academic radiologist interested in decision making in medicine. He became a doctor because a palm reader said he had no chance of a career in Bollywood or international cricket. He trained in Britain and moved to the United States because it seemed like a good idea at the time. He made the mistake of reading Nietzsche before Harry Potter, so he is permanently seeking his Voldermort.