Chronic Tragic Injury In American Football

Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy: The Unseen Damage In American Football.

Hayden Jones St. Mary’s University PSYC 203 Dr. Erin Shanahan April 2, 2024.

A staple within both American and Canadian cultures is football. People love to play it, watch it, and discuss it. It is the most popular sport in the USA and people of all ages partake in the sport. Unfortunately, at its core, it is a violent sport and there are hundreds of football-related injuries every year. There is a section of injury that goes relatively unnoticed and does not come up until after the player’s career has finished: neuropathic damage. Repeated head injuries occur due to collisions between players in every single play, condensing into irreversible brain damage. The most …show more content…
This consists of determining the frequency and severity of mental illnesses and neurological disorders, as well as determining an effective method of limiting these outcomes while preserving the game that people love. The root of neurological issues in athletes stems from the lack of knowledge on the subject; people are not as informed as they should be about the risky behaviour they partake in. Only around 40 percent of college football players acknowledge that they may suffer a concussion while playing the sport. In comparison, only 10 percent understand that there is a chance of developing neurological disorders, including dementia, Alzheimer’s disease, and CTE (Baugh et al., 2017). A major component of the lack of knowledge of CTE in football players is the method of diagnosis. CTE is only diagnosed after death via the examination of post-mortem biopsy of brain tissue. The disease is not well understood and is under research, thus the cause is not distinct yet it is thought to come from repeated head injuries (Smith et al., 2019). CTE does not develop until potentially decades after the head trauma, …show more content…
A caveat to this study is that the subject's football experience was limited to a high school varsity level of competition. It may be more common in players at higher levels of play, including the National Collegiate Athletic Association and the National Football League. Because of the confounding symptoms that are shared by other neurological disorders, CTE remains an enigma to pathologists trying to discern accurate diagnostic criteria and treatment. As a preventative measure to counteract the onset of CTE, Montenigro et al. (2017) articulated a metric that may help sports medicine teams and sports psychologists monitor and predict their player’s condition. They coined the metric the “Cumulative Head Impact Index” (CHII), which measures simulated incidents with potential for head trauma, using football helmets, impact measuring devices, and device accelerators (Montenigro et al., 2017). The use of preventative metrics like CHII may help reduce the incidence of CTE while formal research is completed on the topic. Ultimately, American football is a dangerous sport with hundreds of head-related injuries every year. Repeated

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