On Sept. 28, 2017, in public comments at a school board meeting, I became the first person in Alexandria to call on Alexandria City Public Schools to discontinue tackle football at all levels due to new medical discoveries that showed chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, affects youth and high school football players. Since then, research has also found CTE in other contact sports, including ice hockey, soccer, lacrosse, boxing, martial arts, rugby and wrestling.
Both full-fledged concussions and sub-concussive blows — jarring head impacts but not actual concussions — can contribute to the risk of CTE, which can illicit long-term thinking, memory and mood disorders; behavioral problems, such as lack of impulse control and aggression; depression; impaired judgment; memory loss; paranoia; confusion and progressive dementia.
CTE can only be definitively diagnosed postmortem, although researchers are working on discovering diagnostic methods which can confirm the disease at earlier stages. The CTE center at Boston University’s School of Medicine found that 21 percent of donated high school football players’ and 10 percent of youth and high school athletes’ brains showed signs of CTE.
Athletic directors at all levels of sport have attempted to concoct work-arounds, such as changes in helmet design and concussion protocols. But because CTE can only be definitively diagnosed postmortem, they lack any accountability mechanism to verify whether these work-arounds actually work. These athletic directors will be long gone by the time CTE’s symptoms manifest in today’s student athletes. The prudent path is to discontinue those sports where research has discovered CTE levels in youth.
Of course, ACPS has student athletes’ parents sign legal waivers, but will those waivers legally hold up half a century from now when the injured former student athlete is the one bringing the lawsuit? Current school board members, like elected officials in general, have a time horizon of the next election, so their reaction to my exhortation to discontinue these sports is to defer to majoritarian sentiment. However, student athletes in sports with high CTE incidence who will suffer the consequences should think twice about playing these sports.
Project SAVE is recruiting men and women ages 50 or older who played 5 or more years of a contact sport, including American football, ice hockey, soccer, lacrosse, boxing, full contact martial arts, rugby and wrestling, to determine how repeated head impacts from playing contact sports can lead to CTE.
The writer is an Alexandria civic leader.
