The longer you play football the smaller your brain-memory-area
The University of Tulsa and LIBR have published a study in the AMA Journal which studied 50 former/current Tulsa football players and shows that if you've suffered a concussion or played football for years (peewee, high school), the areas of your brain responsible for memory are statisically likely to be significantly smaller:
http://www.utulsa.edu/about-TU/news-events-publications/UniversityNews/2014/May/brain-study.aspx
Assuming that this data can be replicated, those of us who love college football could end up in the position of watching people slowly undergo long-term brain injury playing a sport we love to cheer for. That's ... uncomfortable at the least.
football will be played by bioengineered androids created specifically for the purpose. While that may seem depressing, the good news is that the Lions will finally win the Super Bowl in 2077 with an android replica of Barry Sanders.
So that's what Fox has been working on. I'm totally fine with androids taking over football if it means Barry Sanders makes a comeback.
Cyberball!!! I love that game. It's year 2072, by the way. I have it on my 360.
It's clones, not androids...
where a few generations had to lose their parents to cancer (we did) before the connection is made between what someone does now, and what will happen to them in 30-50 years. all 5 of my sons play or want to when they are old enough, and i played until i was 41 yrs old. feel fine, no issues, but must admit i am thinking about it where before it would've never entered my mind.
Jared Abredaris and he played with Wisconsin thru the end of the 2013 season.
most of our starters had played pro or major college ball, as had the starters from the teams we played like NYPD, LAPD, LA Fire, Miami, Phoenix and others. the games were played to raise money for various charities, many hundreds of thousands raised n that time. we played all over the country and got to play in some very cool stadiums like the coliseum and jack murphy (now 'qualcomm'). the rest of the details are some decent stories over a beer, but i won't clutter up the blog with them.
this was all after hockey at mich. incidentally, the only time i ever got knocked out was playing for the jr. wings against the windsor spitfires in the old windor arena. diving/sliding to stop a guy's break away attempt back in the days when the nets were pegged into the ice with 10" pegs. next thing i remember was waking up staring up at the lights, tucked way in the back of the net, with both coaches asking me if i was alright.
that you get to play the game the longer you play. i didn't contemplate that i would be playing football, much less in front of somewhere between 3K-20K people, on television, at that point in my life. i was also the benefactor of an OC who was a wizard who had played QB at wyoming and was a champ. i played TE/H-back and that was a feature position in his offense. and as strange as it may sound to sane people, i love to run block probably as much as i like catching the ball.
combine that with the comaraderie of playing with guys who you risk your lives for in your regular job, and short of the military it would be tougher to have a tighter bond with guys than that.
I had a concussion playing in HS. The more I read about the effects of concussions, the more I regret playing. Combined with some sleep problems I (used) to have, I worry about my mental acuity later in life.
You don't get a full ride to UM on a chess scholarship! Better start saving now.
Your first sentence is incredibly ignorant on multiple levels.
You think that football players are idiots, that scientists have never heard of control groups and you ignored the differences between players who suffered concussions and those that didn't.
And it ignores the HUGE gap between "football players aren't smart" and "football players have significantly different brain structure than non-football players."
The former is insulting and inaccurate, but the latter is just... yeah.
like not being connected to the rest of the body
I'm usually one to point out false correlations, but in this case, I believe you are arguing against your stated point...
Not leaving the lab and being weak : Biology ::
Getting hit in the head a lot and losing memory : Football
You're arguing two distinct sides in the post above.
There is a lot that bothers me about what you said and how you said it because I feel it ignores some of the obvious problems which are now well-documented with regard to the risk the game of football carries for its players. That last thing you bring up does need some attention though, or so I believe.
The "concussion scare", as you call it, is not an imagined evil but a real phenomenon. The CDC, I believe, did an excellent cross-sectional study of over 3,000 former players who played at least five years in the NFL from 1959 to 1988 and found that the rate of diagnosable neurological problems (CTE, ALS and even Alzheimer's, among others - I think it focused mainly on recall and movement-related problems) was on average three times higher in the group of former NFL players than in the population at large. It wasn't a concrete neuroimaging study such as what they did at Tulsa, but you can't honestly say that it is merely a "scare". To me, that diminishes very real problems that these guys face as a result of their time in the league.
LSA, honest question, and I hope it doesn't come off the wrong way.
If you are convinced that it is not a scare but a very real problem (a premise I think represents your thoughts), what are your thoughts on the morality of supporting the enterprise as-is (via TV viewing, ticket purchases, much of MGoBlog, etc.)?
You can get hurt playing from football.
Cotton, I am shocked.
but the point isn't "you can get hurt playing football". The point is "you will very likely endure long term brain injury without necessarily knowing it if you play football for an extended period". We've always known you might blow out a knee or suffer from arthritis due to football. We even knew (God forbid) there was risk of paralysis. No one knew there was a much-better-than-decent chance of becoming a 60 year old former boxer with 70 bouts under his belt.
I watch my boy's practices and games very closely. They just don't hit very hard at that age and there isn't enough volocityxmass out there to do much damage. As he progresses, though, we'll have some frank discussions.
There's a difference between "hurt" and "injured." If you're hurt, you can play. If you're injured, you should sit.
We're not talking about "hurt." We're talking about "injured" (and more specifically, "brain damaged")>
I played from 4th grade on till...what the fuck are we talking about again?
Makes sense to me. Getting drilled on the head over a long period of time is not a good thing.
Think of most boxers in their later years.
"This research shows the correlation; the next step is to determine causation so that long-term brain injury can be identified and prevented," he said.
If this is really just a comparison between 25 Tulsa kids who played football and 25 Tulsa kids who didn't, without accounting for the loads of other likely differences between football and non-football players, then it might not be a very informative study. Not saying that it is or isn't, but I think that kind of thing always requires a careful read.
football players who suffered concussions, 25 players who did not and 25 students who did not play football. I'm surprised how many people seem to think little thought is put into designing these studies.
Truthfully, I find the problem much stronger on the other direction -- that so many people accept research results as truth uncritically. I think medical science is generally more trustworthy than social science, but that skepticism that surprises you seems very healthy to me.
It's good to question studies, but it's really hard to look at these numbers:
Results Players with and without a history of concussion had smaller hippocampal volumes relative to healthy control participants (with concussion: t48 = 7.58; P < .001; mean difference, 1788 μL; 95% CI, 1317-2258 μL; without concussion: t48 = 4.35; P < .001, mean difference, 1027 μL; 95% CI, 556-1498 μL). Players with a history of concussion had smaller hippocampal volumes than players without concussion (t48 = 3.15; P < .001; mean difference, 761 μL; 95% CI, 280-1242 μL). In both athlete groups, there was a statistically significant inverse relationship between left hippocampal volume and number of years of football played (t46 = −3.62; P < .001; coefficient = −43.54; 95% CI, −67.66 to −19.41). Behavioral testing demonstrated no differences between athletes with and without a concussion history on 5 cognitive measures but did show an inverse correlation between years of playing football and reaction time (ρ42 = −0.43; 95% CI, −0.46 to −0.40; P = .005).
And have your primary thought be, "well, maybe they just mathed wrong."
They used age-, sex-, and education-comparable individuals as a control group, and produced numbers that are (a) really, REALLY hard to explain away, and (b) are frightening as shit.
But this isn't the only study essentially reaching the same conclusion--by a long shot. No one here is taking this one study as gospel, but rather as more cumulative evidence.
Healthy skepticism is fine, but your skepticism appears to be based more on your not liking the conclusion. Please point us to contrary studies.
There's no doubt in my mind that they did the math right, BiSB (and those differences are huge). The math is the easy part. Getting the comparison groups truly comparable in a non-randomized controlled trial is the hard part. Throwing in a few control variables is far from a guarantee that you'll get remotely comparable groups in the ways that count.
I'm done talking out of my ass, though. It's probably a really good study. I just need to see for myself.
I don't really think so. If you were not questioning the study itself, then what you were doing was telling educated and relatively intelligent people what they already know---that any one study deserves a degree of skepticism.
If we're not allowed to talk out of our asses anymore, than what will become of the internet? WHAT, I ASK???
First, 25 samples at one school is hardly a representative sample, nor is it large enough to offset a ton of internal variation. D1 athletes are not representative of the football playing population at large (nor are D1 students) even at a "mid-major" like Tulsa.
Second, this study was a snapshot - what did these brains look like 5 years ago? 10? When did the damage occur? Or we're the brains always different?
Another interesting group would have been "students who had been diagnosed with a concussion from something other than football".
"25 samples at one school is hardly a representative sample nor is it large enough to offset a ton of internal variation"
I think you mean it isn't a sufficiently sized sample, though it seems like a pretty good size number to me. But look at those P-numbers. There is a chance, mathematically, that these variations arose by chance... but that chance is like win-the-lotto-sized. Even the best-case scenario side of the 95% confidence interval is well within the "yeah, there's a problem" range.
And while a statistically significant difference in hippocampal volume is supported by this study, is that a medically significant amount (I assume it is, but I'm not a neuroscientist)? What does it translate to medically?
In any case, as the authors note, this is just a correlation study. There's still a lot of work to do to figure out exactly what's causing this, if we hope to come up with useful solutions (other than "never play football").
I don't think anyone is saying that this study isn't important or was poorly operated. Certainly no one ought to claim that science supports the idea that football is harmless to the brain. It's just that, as usual, headlines get ahead of the science and get used as bludgeons for people to sell papers and support their pre-existing conclusions.
Would be a long term study of students who did didn't play, the size and development, before and after etc. Could size be determined by activity upon puberty etc.
*shrug* Yes concussions screw your brain, how badly, what's the rate and what can we do? More people go to the NFL and limited to 10 years pro etc? 10 concussions and too bad?
Anywho. 25 is still a small sample size even if you're calling it 75 total, but all research put together can slowly draw a big picture and/or setup better future studies.
25 kids who play baseball, and 25 kids who play soccer, and 25 kids who play hockey, 25 kids who play lacrosse, and 25 gymnasts, and 25 kids who longboard with no helmet, etc.
It seems like all these studies focus on football, and head trauma is common in other sports as well.
This is all about choice. If someone chooses to longboard without a helmet, they are responsible for the risk of brain trauma from an accident. (My son and I argue all the time about wearing a buckled helmet / "but dad many guys don't: it's not cool".)
The point is these people are gifted at something, and love doing it despite the risk, AND many pursuits hold a risk of brain trauma. Should the risks be reduced through rule, care, and technique changes, and better protective technology? Yes.
Ah heck, I guess we all should not leave our houses and get our sports fixes from nice safe video games instead .... we're certain to have a longer lifespan that way /s
They used a control group who presumably did normal kid things when they were kids.
Besides, is the best argument in the "football causes irreversable brain damage" debate really "well, OTHER things might also cause irreversable brain damage"?
so that's our choice----continuing on the same path or raising a generation of sissies? I don't see anyone here advocating banning football. I do see some Dads who might make different decisions about the sports they let their sons and daughters play.
I had more concussions serious kicks/elbows to the head playing soccer and basketball than football.
I wonder as a kid looking back exactly how many were considered concussions and if they cause more damage when you're younger(7-12) or when you're older(12-18) or (18+).
For safety reasons, the game is much different than it was 100 years ago. And for the same reasons it will be much different 100 years from now.
We may lament losing some cool aspects of the game, but we survived losing the very cool flying wedge OK.
This is an honest question because I didn't play past high school, but how hard is it to actually avoid helmet-to-helmet contact? Ex players on ESPN are the first to complain about the practical enforcement of this rule. It seems entirely logical to me: don't hit players in the head. Again, I don't know...is is this possible given the speed and size of *today's* players.
You really can't. How are two linemen supposed to avoid jarring blows to the head?
You can (and should) teach heads-up techniques that reduce the risks of neck injury and limit the incidence of spearing, but a perfect form tackle still jars the brain against the skull with great force.
from whiplash, not just head-to-head/shoulder/etc trauma. to concuss the brain it merely has to float in the brain fluid and bounce off the inside of the skull. certainly cutting down on the head shots would help a lot though.