Amber Eagen can remember the first time she got a concussion. It was two years ago during a basketball game. She took an elbow to the head and dropped to the floor. “I had never gotten one before,” Eagen said. “And I didn’t know how bad it was. I hear about concussions, but you never really know what it’s like until you go through it.”
Tens of thousands of servicemen and women are dealing with lasting brain damage as the Pentagon scrambles to treat these invisible wounds. David Martin reports.
The drumbeat of alarming stories linking concussions among football players and other athletes to brain disease has led to a new and mushrooming American phenomenon: the specialized youth sports concussion clinic, which one day may be as common as a mall at the edge of town.
Inside the autopsy room of the San Diego County medical examiner’s office, Bennet Omalu, a forensic pathologist, carefully sliced Junior Seau’s brain with a long knife. It was late morning on May 3, 2012; Seau’s autopsy, which began just after 9, was nearly over. Omalu wore dark blue scrubs, rubber gloves and a clear plastic face mask as he went about his work in the cool, windowless room, picking up half of Seau’s brain and placing it in a small tub filled with formaldehyde and water.
Charlie Granger, a former offensive lineman for the Dallas Cowboys and the St. Louis Cardinals, says that football was a “brutal, brutal” game when he played back in the 1960s.
The NFL faces an uphill battle protecting players from head trauma and chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE). CrimeTime31 is a real neuroscientist and is here to offer a boiled down perspective of what CTE is and the potential implications for football as we know it. This is not funny
Scientists who have studied a degenerative brain disease in athletes have found the same condition in combat veterans exposed to roadside bombs in Iraq and Afghanistan, concluding that such explosions injure the brain in ways strikingly similar to tackles and punches.