Study estimates 75% of NFL players who died over 15-year span had CTE

It's well established that the effects of repeated head trauma are cumulative, with progressively longer healing periods, worse symptoms, etc. And that sub-concussive impacts also accumulate along with the concussive impacts.

From the article: The bulk of the head impacts that these former NFL players experienced didn’t occur at the NFL level. They occurred at the collegiate level ... and at the high school level and in many cases the youth level. And all of those cumulative hits to the head added up to result in an increased risk,” said Daneshvar.

Requiring a child to play football should be actual child abuse, and even allowing it should be frowned upon the way that letting a child play with a blowtorch is.

also there are studies on this

McKee et al. (2023) – Neuropathologic and Clinical Findings in Young Contact Sport Athletes Exposed to Repetitive Head Impacts (JAMA Neurology) [https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamaneurology/fullarticle/2...]

Alosco et al. (2017) – Age of First Exposure to Tackle Football and Later-Life Cognitive Impairment and Neuropsychiatric Symptoms (Translational Psychiatry) [https://doi.org/10.1038/tp.2017.197]

even intl football headers have concerns

Provide your data Mr. Thrwaway, if that even is your real name.

Correct. NFL payers are better paid, get better medical care, have better training and equipment, and their brains are more developed.

If they don’t play and everyone else does, their development will be many years behind their peers which makes it unlikely they could play at a high level.

But maybe you’re okay with that.

At the same time, a lot of parents (myself included) steered kids to other sports. That had another effect: there was even more pressure on parents who didn't care about CTE (and their kids) to get into football because kiddie leagues and especially high school teams were short of players. This happened to a friend whose two boys were strong hockey players, the coach at their school pushed them to try out for football the following season.

Yes, you’re optimizing for your kids individual life but nothing we Americans do anymore is holistic. It’s all short-term thinking.

I'm quite thankful that I never ended up on the team, and think the entire concept of high school football is incredibly stupid given what we know about CTE.

Boxing is by far the worst from this point of view, much worse than the combat sports that allow knock-outs but also have other alternatives, like MMA.

Combat sports like judo or fencing are much safer than American football.

The equipment to make it safe is the problem - it allows you to take orders of magnitude more blows to the head. There were many people saying that to improve the safety of football, you should get rid of helmets entirely.

Padded helmets in football and padded gloves in boxing serve the same purpose as having filters on cigarettes. Filters on cigarettes allow you to smoke a lot more, and a lot of the stuff that is worst for you is not filtered out.

It's fairly likely they'll change the rules to reduce injuries. In the US, they already banned kids under 10 from deliberately heading, with some practice rules after that.

And ultimately, changing the rules is sort of like a ban. You can't (competitively) play the original sport.

Soccer is addressing the concussion issue by banning headers. I think the current rule is no headers for U12s and below. That will probably be adjusted upwards to U14s at some point.

I'd rather my child accept a high risk of sprain, than even a low change of CTE.

I know a ex-professional football player that doesn't let his children play football.

My daughter does Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu since a few years already now: her uncle is a black belt. She skateboards too. Those aren't "safe" sports. BTW she already dislocated someone else's arm (nothing serious but the other person wanted to "see if BJJ works": she got her answer).

And yet there are sports I won't let her do, like proximity flying or basejumping for example.

Saying: "All sports have risks, so all sports are equally risky" is a logical fallacy.

I did, and I agree with the comment you responded to.

Pretty much all my worst injuries are related to football, sprains, hip issues, knee issues, and a concussion that took me out of a game in college.

Or why let our children take any risk?

Why let our children take all risks?

I fear I have some mild anger problems. I can't tell you if any of it is even related to football, but if I could go back and stop myself from playing football in middle and high school, I would in a heartbeat. I hated the sport and felt trapped. I imagine I'm not the only kid with a similar story. And just because I never had an official injury doesn't mean the sport had no effect on my developing brain.

Kids don't always have the autonomy to make decisions for themselves; we don't let them use cigarettes or alcohol, get tattoos, etc. The sport has the ability to leave lasting damage on those playing it unlike other sports because impacts are intrinsic to the game as it's currently played. Other sports like soccer can and have banned headers.

I think it's reprehensible to continue allowing children to continue playing contact football.

I did for eight years, from 5th grade through 12th grade. There was a lot of value in learning aspects of teamwork, comradery, and working towards a common goal. However, given the hard data we have on the potential dangers, I am not letting either of my sons play. There are plenty of other ways (and sports) to get those lessons with much lower risks to their developing brains.

I think we can all agree that injuries to the brain are especially worrisome for children, especially when compared to common baseball injuries (hamstring, elbow, rotator cuff, etc.)

Most of a football game is spent waiting for resumption of play, while girls soccer is continuous.

Football also introduces a different type of collision than those experienced on a soccer field (conceding girls soccer can be pretty intense). Dangerous football plays are by design, often straight ahead collisions, while contact in soccer is often incidental.

We are finding lifelong debilitating disease in football players, at rates far exceeding other sports, so I think it's fair to scrutinize the risk. Entering a profession that promises a 75% likelihood of degenerate brain injury is a sobering thought. Then consider high school and college football players are exposing themselves to the risk of developing some form of this disease before they're old enough to understand the risk, and without a luxury lifestyle to show for it.

FWIW, I played American football for 10 years and I relished contact, but older and wiser now I think I could have scratched that itch in a safer way.

In other sports it's called an accident. In football it's called Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy. The equivalent in baseball would be if the rules/style of the game required to batter the bat ball by smashing it on their head every single time.

The article also explains how it works, and while someone that stops playing football after high school stops the increase of the "cumulative blows to the head" counter, it still leaves a trace.

Considering that by 50 you'd have the brain of an 80 year old, I don't see why expose myself to that risk in the first place.

yes. unfortunately, more than one thing can be a problem at the same time.

Kickers do kickoffs, extra points, and field goals. Besides that they're not on the field. The only time hitting a kicker is allowed is if it's some sort of fake play where the kicker ends up running with the ball. Even then, there tends to be a gentleman's agreement where teams won't rough up the opposing kicker, as doing so means their own kicker is fair game.

I knew one guy who was a kicker for a PAC-12 team (back when it was the PAC-10). He said he was hit only once in 4 years. Earlier in the game he'd insulted someone on the other team, and the next time they were both on the field, the guy hit him from behind long after the whistle blew. That's not really a football injury as much as it's a violent crime.

As far as I'm aware, no kicker has ever been found to have CTE (though the sample size for them is very small), and their concussion rates are much lower than average. I think the studies on kicker concussion rates overestimate how often they sustain head injuries, as they likely incorporate data from less competitive colleges and high schools where kickers also play other positions.

I'm sure there's some obscure spelunker who died in a cave, unknown to anyone but their friends. It's the commercialization of risk for entertainment that makes it icky. At some point along that curve it's OK for a civilized society to just say no, to boxing, for example.

Current line of scrimmage situation is the worst case scenario. Linemen are a couple feet away from each other and they start from a crouched position. They explode up and hit the opposing line, very often with their helmet/crown, down after down, 60-70 times a game. You could not plan a better way to get CTE.

1) Neutral zone at the line, they start 2 yards away from each other.

2) Have to start from standing position, and/or:

3) First contact has to be arms

It would be a bit of an adjustment like it was for dynamic kickoff. You're never going to stop all head trauma in a contact sport but the mechanics of the line positions are basically designed for it.

In MMA there are alternative winning methods which decide a large fraction of the matches, even if hitting the head still remains the most frequent method for winning a match before the time limit (strangling is the 2nd most frequent, and unlike head knockouts it does not have persistent effects even when the loser fails to accept defeat, strikes to the liver are the 3rd, then joint locks and strikes to the legs).

Moreover, a MMA fighter has much more effective defense methods than a boxer, so a much lower percentage of the attempts to hit the head of the opponent are successful, in comparison with a boxing match. Also, the lighter MMA gloves do not allow strikes to the head as powerful as in boxing, because those would result in hand injuries.

MMA matches look more gory, because of frequent skin cuts, which result in bleeding, but those pose very little danger in comparison with the strikes to the head given with heavy boxing gloves, which do not produce visible external bleeding but they produce much more harmful internal damage to the brain.

In any case, sports like boxing or MMA are unsuitable for amateurs. They are acceptable only for professionals who are willing to accept the risk of health damage in exchange for a sum of money big enough to allow them an early retirement, hopefully before accumulating too much damage.

But then again I’m generally suspicious of people strongly condemning the free, legal, and informed choices of others.

Even these studies are heavily weighted to those with suspected injuries and so not a good sample.

> They found 96% (27 of 28) of professional players had CTE pathology (18 of 19 NHL, 9 of 9 non-NHL professionals), 46% of college, juniors and semi-professional players (13 of 28) and 10% (2 of 21) youth and high school players.

https://www.bumc.bu.edu/camed/news-events/articles/2024/larg...

They either need to make it safer or stop the sport altogether. Or at least stop letting kids play tackle. If an adult wants to make that choice, maybe we let them, but don't let adults make that choice for kids.

> but at the same time, there were lots of fatalities in the early, leather-helmet days of the sport.

This is a good point. We'd need to know if that was because medical science was worse or if it was actually less safe.

You can solve this by playing all the games on sand!