Big Hits

T here aren't many sports articles in the journal Science, so it was with great interest that I read " A Late Hit for Pro-Football Players " by Greg Miller (www. sciencemag.org). 3 This article is a very interesting compilation of recent research and developments in the area of sports-related concussion. The article highlights the efforts of Chris Nowinski, a former Harvard football standout who reached stardom as a professional wrestler. His fame and fortune were cut short by a series of concussions which forced him into early retirement. Disturbed by the chronic symptoms related to his head trauma and the lack of medical research in the area, Nowinski co-founded The Sports Legacy Institute (www. sportslegacy.org), a nonprofit dedicated to research of sports-related head injuries. A partner in the effort is Ann McKee, a neuropathologist at Boston University, who has researched the processes of neurodegeneration in diseases such as Alzheimer's. The institute's goal is to understand the relationship between contact sports and the disturbing pathology found to date in some former athletes. Obviously, there are thousands of former athletes who played contact sports who are not walking around " punch drunk " and do not appear to have suffered any ill effects from their athletic endeavors. In fact, knowing the profiles of many of the stars on today's sports pages, some may say that the games they played actually knocked some sense into them. All kidding aside, even if the feared degeneration is not detectable in most players, the preliminary evidence is serious enough that all involved should take a hard look at these findings. Considering the fact that there are over 300 000 sports-related concussions annually in the United States, 1 even if only a small percentage develops long term problems, this could represent a major challenge for our health care system. The relationship between sports head trauma and neurodegeneration is strongest in boxing. In 1928, Harrison Martland, a pathologist, wrote of his studies of battered boxers and their subsequent brain damage. The syndrome " Dementia Pugilistica " evolved which demonstrated Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE) at autopsy. Fast forward to 2005, when Bennet Omalu reports the first case of neurodegeneration in a young National Football League (NFL) player. 5 Omalu, the Chief Medical Examiner for San Joaquin County, California, examined the brain of Michael Webster (Iron Mike), a veteran Pittsburgh Steeler star of 17 NFL seasons, who died at …