August 29, 2023 – Among contact sports athletes under the age of 30, researchers found that 4 in 10 suffered from the brain disease chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE).
The study was published on Monday within the magazine JAMA Neurology and examined the donated brains of 152 athletes aged 13 to 29. The study was conducted by researchers at Boston University, who found that 3 to 4 years of playing time appeared to make the difference between whether or not a player showed signs of CTE. The youngest age of athletes diagnosed with CTE was 17.
The study participants played, amongst other things, football, ice hockey, soccer, rugby and wrestling.
Among athletes, suicide was the leading reason for death, and accidental overdose was the second commonest. The researchers found no differences within the reason for death depending on whether someone was diagnosed with CTE.
Researchers analyzed the brains of 152 people, and 41% of them were diagnosed with CTE. One woman was diagnosed with CTE, and the remaining were men. Of the 63 people diagnosed with CTE, 60 had signs of mild disease (called stage I or II). Three people had stage III, and people three people included a former National Football League player, a school football player, and an expert rugby player. None of the study participants were diagnosed with essentially the most severe stage of the disease, called stage IV. The brains were donated between 2008 and 2022.
Among the donors, 111 were white, 27 were black, one was American Indian or Alaska Native, and 13 were biracial, of one other race resembling Tongan, or their race was not specified. Black donors were more more likely to be diagnosed with CTE than other donors. Black brain donors overall tended to be a median of greater than 1.5 years older than donors of other races, and black donors played football a median of 4 years longer.
People diagnosed with CTE were on average 4 years older than people with no diagnosis. When evaluating football players alone, those diagnosed with CTE played a median of three years longer than players with no CTE diagnosis. The woman diagnosed with CTE played college football.
“It seems to be widely accepted now that you can play American football or ice hockey at a very high level and get CTE,” said the director of the university's CTE center, Ann McKee, MD, in a opinion“But we are seeing the beginnings of this disease in young people who were mainly involved in amateur sports.”
Many members of the family reported that the donors had cognitive and neurological symptoms, and these symptoms were common no matter whether researchers found CTE in a donor. Symptoms resembling depression, impulsivity and explosiveness were common among the many donors, and researchers wrote that the findings underscore “that not all contact sport athletes with symptoms have CTE.”
“These results underline the twin role of age and duration of exposure to [repetitive head impacts] in the event of CTE, even in younger people,” the authors summarize.