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https://www.bloomberg.com/news/feat...ain-trauma-protect-nfl-players-or-end-the-nfl
"During this year’s playoffs, the NFL has been airing TV commercials with the tag line “The Future of Football.” One of them shows a white-coated technician loading blood samples into a Quanterix machine. “We’re trying to develop the best tools, ones that will allow us to diagnose concussions in real time,” says the narrator, Teena Shetty, a neurologist who consults with the New York Giants. Quanterix’s concussion research fits into the NFL’s vision of a future in which head trauma is neatly contained. A pinprick sideline test would make everyone rest easy when a player who just took a head shot returns to the field.
The CTE research is less comfortable for the league. For several years after Webster died, the NFL downplayed the problem of head trauma. In 2009, after being called to testify before Congress, Goodell ducked questions about the link between football and neurological disease. “Medical experts would know better than I do,” he said.
Nobody knows how common CTE is among current and former NFL players. “Some people have said up to 90 percent,” Bailes says. “I think it’s much less than that.” Not everybody who suffers repetitive head trauma winds up with the disease. And nobody knows why some get it and others don’t. It could have to do with the intervals between hits, with genetics, with nutrition. A test for the living would make it possible to begin sorting this out, to devise prevention programs, and maybe even find drugs that can reverse the damage. This is the hope, both for CTE sufferers and for the NFL."
"During this year’s playoffs, the NFL has been airing TV commercials with the tag line “The Future of Football.” One of them shows a white-coated technician loading blood samples into a Quanterix machine. “We’re trying to develop the best tools, ones that will allow us to diagnose concussions in real time,” says the narrator, Teena Shetty, a neurologist who consults with the New York Giants. Quanterix’s concussion research fits into the NFL’s vision of a future in which head trauma is neatly contained. A pinprick sideline test would make everyone rest easy when a player who just took a head shot returns to the field.
The CTE research is less comfortable for the league. For several years after Webster died, the NFL downplayed the problem of head trauma. In 2009, after being called to testify before Congress, Goodell ducked questions about the link between football and neurological disease. “Medical experts would know better than I do,” he said.
Nobody knows how common CTE is among current and former NFL players. “Some people have said up to 90 percent,” Bailes says. “I think it’s much less than that.” Not everybody who suffers repetitive head trauma winds up with the disease. And nobody knows why some get it and others don’t. It could have to do with the intervals between hits, with genetics, with nutrition. A test for the living would make it possible to begin sorting this out, to devise prevention programs, and maybe even find drugs that can reverse the damage. This is the hope, both for CTE sufferers and for the NFL."
