Stuff You Should Know - What's the Deal with Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy?

Episode Date: November 17, 2016

Concussions are bad enough for football players, but research has found all of those smaller hits can add up to massive brain trauma later in life too, leading to a condition called chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a condition the NFL sought to cover up. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

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Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from house.works.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark with Charles W. Chupp and Bryant and Jerry. This is Stuff You Should Know, breaking news from 2015 edition. No, this is still very relevant. Sure it is, it definitely is,

but I mean like the end of last year, the beginning of this year, it certainly made the rounds a little more with the movie Concussion, which is apparently like roundly criticized by everyone involved in the study of CTE. I didn't see it just because, you know, didn't look that good to me as a movie.

Well, apparently it really like did a lot of oversimplification. It came to a lot of conclusions about the science that haven't been reached yet and may never be reached. It was just kind of like. But there are some really good documentaries out there and I want to tout one just right off the bat.

There's a two hour front line on this called League of Denial. Did you see it? No. Man, it is good. Yeah. I'm not quite sure when it's from, maybe sometime between 2012 and 2014 or 15.

Yeah. But it was based on this book by the Faena brothers, who wrote League of Denial, the book. And it was just about their investigation into what the NFL knew or didn't know about concussions, possibly leading to this condition called CTE. We can just call it CTE, right? Well, practicing.

You say it once and full. I'm definitely going to screw it over. And then we'll just say CTE after that. Okay. The condition is called chronic traumatic encephalopathy. Yeah, great. CTE. Yeah, CTE.

Thanks for jumping on that grenade for the team. Right. Yeah. We've known about it for a while. It's got my other names farther back in the medical literature. Sure. And we did our own in 2009, long time ago,

we did one on concussions called, do concussions calls early death. Yeah. Remember that one? Yeah. And I don't even think we, I don't even know CTE was on a radar at the time. I don't know if it, maybe we might have mentioned it.

It started to really seep out in the news around 2009. So we probably mentioned it, but I don't think we understood it or recognized it like we do now. Yes. Meaning like you and me. Sure. Yeah.

Just two yokels. Right. Behind the microphone. Watching from the sidelines if you'll forgive the pun. So you did mention the other names back in the day. In fact, we can go all the way back shockingly to 1928. There was a dude named Dr. Harrison T. Martland.

And he published an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association. And he, you know, you've heard the term punch drunk in relation to boxers, like outside the ring. Like, you know, this big Ray, he's a little punch drunk. Right. He was a boxer. What he was talking about,

although he didn't know it at the time, was CTE, which is, it's really remarkable. It resembles, if you had no idea, and you were just a doctor looking at a brain, post more to my guess. Right. Let's really know the way to say it. Because in order to, unfortunately right now,

in order to study CTE, you have to look at a brain under a microscope. Right, which you can't really do while the person's alive. Yeah. So if you didn't know any better, you would see a brain and say, well, this person has had a degenerative illness in the brain.

Right. Neurological illness, and I would say Parkinson's and dementia, it's all here. But the striking thing is, it's not an illness. It is literally from repeated blows to the head. Yeah, it's not disease causing, or it's not caused by disease, right? Yeah, it's like a traumatic brain injury.

Repeated. But some people put themselves into a situation over and over again, where they're going to be exposed to the possibility of traumatic brain injury, right? Yeah. And chief among them is Boxers. And this Dr. Martlin was basically describing this in the medical literature, from what I understand,

just the symptoms, right? I don't think he was looking at brains, was he? No, I don't think he was, or trying to identify, I mean, he called it punch-drunk syndrome, but. Or dementia pugilistica. Oh, is that it? It sounds way more clinical. Scientific name.

Yeah. Yeah, it's what he was looking at with CTE, and we now know that. We know that now. But again, he was just kind of describing the symptoms. It wasn't until I think the science got a little further that they really started to look at brains, and we understood that Boxers were at risk

for what we understand now as CTE. Yeah, they'd reached middle age. They would be a little more confused. Maybe get dizzy when they're walking around, be unsteady, maybe just slower, generally moving around. And they were like, yeah, I got a punch-drunk. Just think of Rocky, from Rocky IV on. I'd get them confused after Rocky III.

So Rocky III was Mr. T? Yeah. Or was Rocky II Mr. T? No, Rocky II was the rematch with Apollo. Okay, well then Rocky IV was with Ivan Drago and Brigitte Nielsen. I didn't even really see that one all the way through, I don't think.

What, you didn't? No. That's like Lesser Rocky to me. Well, that was when I was running around in the woods like shooting Ruskies with my fake M16 as like a seven, eight-year-old. Oh, so sure. So this would have been like right there for me.

And it was, big time. I saw it in the theater. I'm sure like I saw it right when it came out on video. Right. I'm sure I talked my parents into getting showtime so I could see it. You had the burn, commie, burn T-shirts on. And then the iron curtain fell and I was like,

wait a minute, none of the stuff that we were told holds up. Yeah. People just trying to get by over there. Exactly. Just like us. So where were we? Well, this is where we were checked. I think it's really important to say that,

yes, people knew there was such a thing as CTE. They called it punch, drunk syndrome for a very long time. But everybody said boxers know that this is going on. They're gonna pay millions, exactly. They're getting paid millions of dollars to do this. They're doing it on their own accord. And this is such a small tranche of the population of the world.

Really, who cares? And we should definitely say the medical establishment, especially in the United States that we care. We have been calling on the Boxing Association and the government to ban boxing. Yeah, since the 50s. Since the 50s, right. But for the most part, America said,

well, we love a good fight, so we're not gonna go along with that. You guys keep boxing. Right. And that was the way it went until 2002. And ladies are boxing now too. Yes, they are. Not that that's super new.

And super bring CTE just like men. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, that's not super new, but I think female boxing has grown a lot. I think especially since Muhammad Ali's daughter got into it. Oh yeah, she definitely helped. That brought a lot of attention.

Tremendously. Do you remember when the Boxing Association tried to make female boxers wear skirts when they boxed? Did they really? Yes. Interesting. The whole thing was just like an onion setup, but it was real life.

And it was, first of all, making any woman in any profession wear a skirt these days is kind of untoward if you ask me. But secondly, choose the one profession where you shouldn't attempt to tell a woman to wear anything, let alone a skirt she doesn't want to. Female boxing is the first one that comes to mind. It's very interesting.

Is it female boxing or women's boxing? Probably both. All right, okay. All right, so 2002. Let's flash forward a little bit into the more modern era. There was a neuropathologist still is named Bennett Omalu, who, that's who Will Smith played, right?

Wasn't that about him? Right. Okay. I guess I should see that. I'm not a big Will Smith fan. You should just watch the- Or a fan of bad biopics. Watch League of Denial.

He's interviewed extensively in it. Yeah, great. He's better, he does a better Omalu than Will Smith. Omalu does. So there was a man center for the Pittsburgh Steelers, Hall of Famer, Mike Webster, died of a heart attack at age 50, and he wound up in the care of Omalu for his autopsy,

and he started looking around the brain and said, there's something going on here that's really weird. If you remember when we did, well, the concussions then, what was the other ones that Alzheimer's recently? Where we talked about- We did dementia. Okay, dementia where we talked about beta amyloid proteins.

Yeah, they build up as like a plaque, right? Yeah, they build up like a plaque, and then these tal proteins come along afterward and really do a lot of damage. He noticed that Webster had a lot of these tal proteins, but not the former beta amyloid proteins, which is really weird. It was weird in that when he opened up Mike Webster's skull

and started poking around his brain, like Mike Webster had been showing all of the classic symptoms of Alzheimer's and dementia for many, many years now. Long before he died of a heart attack at age 50, which is pretty young. So Amalu was like, surely I'm gonna find these beta amyloids, and he didn't.

So that, the lack of beta amyloids made him dig a little deeper and really start looking at Mike Webster's brain. And that's when he found the tal proteins, and he's like, what are these doing here? Especially by themselves. Well, yeah, and that's like I said earlier, everyone thought he had Alzheimer's and dementia,

but he just had dementia, which is not the way it's supposed to work. Right. So it was a startling find, to say the least, and this was, I believe, the first NFL player, a former player that had this disease and was diagnosed with it, post-mortem. Amalu, who was, I think, like the forensic pathologist

with Pittsburgh, diagnosed him with chronic traumatic encephalopathy. The first, like you said, the first football player ever to have this diagnosis. Up to this point, it had been Boxer's. Had he been a Boxer, it would have made zero news whatsoever. Right. But the fact that he was a football player,

this is kind of weird. And we'll talk about why this was so strange and weird right after this. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it.

It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger

and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it, and popping it back in, as we take you back to the 90s.

Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s, called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. Ah, OK, I see what you're doing.

Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place, because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, god. Seriously, I swear.

And you won't have to send an SOS, because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yeah, we know that, Michael, and a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life step by step.

Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general, can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody, about my new podcast, and make sure to listen, so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart

radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. So, Chuck, we were saying that Bennett O'Malu diagnosed Mike Webster with CTE. Yes. And when he did, it made huge waves. And the reason why was because Mike Webster was the first NFL player to be diagnosed with this. But for a very long time, for pretty much the last decade,

the NFL had been fighting off this idea that concussions were worse than just having your bell wrong, or whatever cute thing you want to call coming close to losing consciousness, because the acceleration of your brain smacking against the inside of your skull has cognitively disabled you temporarily. That's right. The NFL, oh boy, we're getting into it now.

They have a long checkered history with trying to protect players from injury and trying to protect their own interests as either a massive revenue-generating corporation and one that wants to keep its players safe, but also not be on the hook. Want to make that money. Well, and not be on the hook for their injuries.

Oh, yeah, yeah. You're playing the NFL. You know what you're getting into? There's chances are, and this was long. I mean, everyone always knew, like, yeah, when you get old, you're not going to be able to walk that well. You're going to have creaky knees and a bad back, and all the stuff that come along with getting hammered

on the field each and every week. But they always did try to sort of downplay this concussion. And it's only in recent years that they've really made official a protocol for dealing with concussions. Yes, it was always like, I want to get back in the game, coach, and they're like, how do you feel? You know where you are? Yeah, yeah, I'm good.

All right, get back in there. Right, right. And it was a direct result of this initial diagnosis from 2002 of CTE by Ben and O'Malu of Mike Webster, right? That all of this change we're seeing over the last couple of seasons, which apparently are having, like, great effects already as it comes from this moment in time, right?

And part and parcel of that diagnosis was also a lawyer that had been hired by Mike Webster or his family, either right before he died or right after he died. And the lawyer was trying to build a case to get Mike Webster disability from the NFL's disability committee. And the disability committee made a decision based on the science that was presented to them that said,

yes, without a doubt, Mike Webster had severe brain damage and cognitive impairment from his years of playing football. And then it was the only time they'd admitted it. They'd been putting it off for years. And it got buried. And from that moment on, the NFL completely changed its course and just denied and I deny.

And that was the state of affairs there for a while. But as that was going on, simultaneously, Bennett Omalu, who has been, at times, very much vilified, he's put his foot in his mouth a lot. He speaks publicly out of line. He said once that he would bet his medical license that OJ Simpson has CTE and the implication being that that's why he killed Ronald Goldman and Nicole Brown.

I guess I should say, allegedly, I don't know. What do you say if somebody gets off for murder in a criminal trial but is convicted of it in a civil trial? I don't know. At any rate, just saying stuff that a man of science shouldn't do. But the thing is, is when you look at the work that he's doing,

his actual work is unimpeachable. His public persona is kind of lacking. But at the same time, the work he's doing stands up. And there's plenty of other people who have kind of come and joined the cause or were already researching CTE, who have really kind of redoubled their efforts to try to figure out what's going on here. Yeah, chiefly, there's a neuropathologist

named Ann McKee that has joined up with him. And they're sort of the main face of this CTE campaign at this point. She's in League of Denial as well. There's just really interesting people because they're very much dedicated to getting to the bottom of it. Yeah, and one of the big reasons why this is a bigger deal

than when we're talking about boxing and how many people, boxing's pretty niche sport. But a lot of kids play football. And what they're finding out is that children especially are at risk because they think, and this is all, they said they're in the toddler phase of CTE research right now. So they're really learning a lot as we speak.

But one thing they think is a big factor is the strength of the neck to brace and deal with these hits to the head. Sure. Obviously, that doesn't mean like, oh, you've got a strong neck. You can just get hit in the head over and over and over. But they're saying for kids, especially these young boys and even girls now who play football,

is like early teenagers, it's super dangerous. There's also a brain research named Robert Cantu from Boston University. And he was saying that in addition to the neck being less developed, the myelin sheaths which protect our nerves, including our neurons in our brain, are less developed. So there's less protection.

And there's other factors too. Girls are more susceptible to CTE than boys. And if you're dehydrated, you're more likely to develop CTE. There's a lot of different risk factors, but it does seem to be age is definitely one of them. And the problem is, if you send a kid in, 14-year-old, into a game, and they get a concussion,

and they keep playing, they may stop playing football after high school. But decades later, they could conceivably develop CTE. They could develop CTE without ever having officially had a concussion. You know, they're doing these tests now with these sensors inside helmets. And you don't necessarily have to have a concussion.

It's all about this sustained abuse over time. Right. So there's. And it's not just football. No, it's not. There's a bunch of other activities, I guess you could say, including sports, but non-sports too. Activities like getting in car crashes over and over again.

Well, true. But obviously hockey, rugby, wrestling, soccer, all those header balls, they say, can have an impact over time. Yeah, as a matter of fact, soccer, internationally and nationally, is starting to come under more scrutiny, because they're realizing, like, yeah, you don't have to get a concussion to develop CTE.

Horseback riding, they list. La Crosse, skiing. Most of those are sports-based. But anything where you are getting that sort of impact repeatedly over time, it builds that damage up, it seems like. It's not like once you get over that concussion, then you're back at square zero. Exactly.

That's exactly right. It's progressive, right? Yeah. So in what they're finding, based on some of these tests, like you were saying, there's something called subconcussive events too, where, say, like you're heading a soccer ball. But you don't see stars afterward, or you are fine with bright lights.

There's no symptoms of a concussion. But as far as your brain's concerned, it just took an impact. And as these things accumulate, little subconcussive events, especially when an actual concussion is thrown in, or multiple concussions, that's what they think is the mechanism behind the development of CTE. All right, so symptom-wise, if you're

talking to the average everyday person, and they want to understand what it's like, there are different stages. There are three. In stage one, you're going to be dizzy and have headaches. And also, your attention span is going to be cut down. You're going to have that general difficulty concentrating on things.

You're going to be disoriented. You might be a little more aggressive and have bad impulse control, which. And I know Amalu probably shouldn't be shooting his mouth off about OJ. But I mean, that's possible. Like, there have been all sorts of situations where these NFL players, like their families,

are saying they're not the same person. They're aggressive. They're getting in fights now, which they never used to do. They're depressed or suicidal. So oddly, they're not showing. I don't think they were conclusively showing that link yet, but it seems to sort of be obvious. And in fact, we should say that there

has not been a conclusive link between repetitive head injuries from sports, from contact sports, and CTE. The science is still being worked out. And of course, again, there's never anything. There's no such thing as settled science. So if that's what you're looking for, it's never going to get there. But what they're starting to do now

is amass enough of a medical literature that, yes, the link will be conclusive, basically. All right, so second stage, in addition to all the first, your behavior might get even more unpredictable, and your memory is even worse. And then finally, stage three, all those former stages, plus even slower movements, literally staggering, trembling, deafness, maybe you can't even speak correctly.

Yeah. The final stage is very sad. Right, and so if you are a doctor, and somebody comes to you presenting like this, you're going to be like, wow, this guy's got Alzheimer's. Or you would have before. Now you'd probably be a lot more likely to be like, you might have CTE.

Right, but we can't check. No, no, you can't. And let's go a little into the brain. The only way that you can diagnose CTE is postmortem, like you were saying, right? Yeah. And what they're looking for is this accumulation of tau proteins.

And again, they're not 100% certain how this is going on. But this is what they think, especially when they start to include research on tau proteins from Alzheimer's. So normally, in your brain, tau proteins give structure to what are called microtubules, which are inside the neurons. And they basically act as little transport channels

inside each of your little brain cells, right? Well, these tau proteins strengthen and de-strengthen these microtubules, depending on whether the brain needs those microtubules at any time. And there's some type of event called hyperphosphoration in which the tau proteins actually become destabilized. They're weakened, which is normal, but they're not able to regain strength, which is also normal.

So as they become weaker and weaker and weaker, these tau proteins actually kind of break up. And they start to accumulate within the neuron. They accumulate in the axon, which is where a neuron transmits information. They're in the dendrites eventually, which is where it receives information. And then they start to accumulate even in just the neural body.

And with all this starting to clog up, the neuron itself dies. And when enough of this stuff happens, a whole region of the brain can start to die off and wither. And that's when you have all of these symptoms that are basically identical to Alzheimer's. The key is this. They have associated the presence of this

in former football players who are known to have gotten concussions, who are known to have gotten all of these subconcussive events on a daily basis with what they're seeing in these same dead football players' brains. And at this point, all they can do is say, yeah, man, like, of course, this caused this. But they can't say exactly how it's causing it.

They haven't reached that point yet. All right. Well, let's take a break. And we'll come back and talk a little bit more about where this is all headed and what the NFL is doing about it. On the podcast, HeyDude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show HeyDude, bring you back to the days of slipdresses and choker

necklaces. We're going to use HeyDude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and nonstop references to the best decade ever.

Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper,

because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in, as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to HeyDude, the 90s, called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast,

Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. Ah, OK, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation?

If you do, you've come to the right place, because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, god. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS, because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so, my husband, Michael.

Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general, can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now.

If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. All right, so one of the big problems with CTE is that there is no cure at this point. So the best practice is to avoid the cause, which

is getting hit in the head a lot over and over and over. Yeah, but how do you do that with football? Well, that's the rub. It's very tough. There are some schools of thought that say, these players know what they're getting into. If you ask them, many of them would probably, if not most, say, we know the risks.

We are willing to shorten our lives. Our careers will be limited, all for the rush of being on that field, the adoration of the fans, and all that money. We know what we're getting into. We know it's a dangerous thing, and we're willing to do so anyway. A lot of them would.

Not all of them, though. Well, of course not. I mean, there have been some really high-profile cases, like a guy named Junior Sayow, who's a legend in the NFL. He committed suicide. And his brain, after a very long struggle, was diagnosed with CTE. I can't speak for anybody who's died,

but there are a lot of people who are suffering now who wouldn't go back and do it again the exact same way. Well, regret is different than, I mean, you asked the young man exiting college, and he says, yeah, I know where this is going to lead me. You asked the old person suffering from dementia, and they'll say, well, young me didn't know what he was talking about.

I would trade all the money and all the fame to go back and lead a fuller life. Right, the key to this, though, Chuck, is would that young man's, if you go back even further, to that 10-year-old boy, would his mom, knowing all this, let him play? Yeah, numbers are down in little league football, for sure. Which is bad news for the NFL, because those little league

players who are really good eventually become NFL stars that make the NFL a lot of money, which is one of the main reasons why they tried very hard to clamp down on public awareness of this. So the NFL, on their part, have tried to limit concussions now. It's not working so far, as far as limiting concussions.

Oh, no, I thought they were down. In 2014, there were 206. In 2015, there were 271. So. Oh, that's not what I saw. Yeah, it really depends on the year. Like, they're up and down each year. They're definitely not in some downward trajectory,

though, overall. So PBS has gone all in on tracking CTE. And they actually did a concussion watch. And they counted the concussions, I guess, diagnosed. Concussions, I'm not sure, in every game. And they came up with 199 in 2015. Well, the NFL says 271, which is sort of counter to what you would think.

NFL or PBS, as far as the stats for football goes. Well, you'd think the NFL would be the ones under playing it. Right. But at any rate, they've tried to change some of the rules as far as leading as a tackler with the crown of your helmet. They have moved the kickoff forward. So now there aren't as many runbacks on kickoffs.

And that's where a lot of the high impact collisions occur. Oh, yeah. Is on kickoffs and the special teams plays. Sure. It's a rub, though, because fans, like, the NFL is known. And I love the NFL. Like, I'm at odds with myself on this, because part of what you love about the game

is the game as it is. And you can't regulate injury out of the NFL or head injury out of the NFL, because it wouldn't be football anymore. Like, you literally couldn't have people tackling people. Right. I actually went to a game. Have you ever been to an NFL game and sat close to the field? Close-ish.

It's like I was talking to my buddies who I was with. I was like, you get close down there. And you're like, man, I would literally need an ambulance on any play that happened, period. I don't see how these men get up at all when you see these collisions they take. But that's what the fans love about the sport, and that's what the NFL is built on.

So to change that would fundamentally change the game. But at the same time, the NFL, they've been really shady as far as how they've handled all this over the years. There was a congressional report that found that they basically made a $30 million gift, unrestricted gift, in 2012 to the National Institutes of Health to look into head injuries. They found out that the research wasn't so

friendly to the NFL. So they tried to get the main researcher from Boston College or BU stripped of his position, even though they weren't supposed to monkey around with any of it. It was like, no, you do your unbiased research and we're staying out of it. But fire that guy. Yeah, they didn't stay out of it.

They were found out. Then they said, you know what? We're not going to give you that full 30 million then. Oh, you're joking. They pulled the final $16 million from the research. And basically denied up until literally this year in March of this year was the first time an NFL Senior Vice President stood up and acknowledged the link between CTE

publicly and football. Well, they also settled with 5,000 former players for a billion dollars. And they settled because it was found that they had tried to suppress evidence about concussions leading to CTE, keep the players unaware of this. Yeah. And a lot of those players now are saying, no, no, no.

Now this all come out. They're like, that payoff is nothing. Sure. Like I went out of this suit. Yeah, again, please, please take the time to go watch League of Denial. They do such an amazing job talking about the nefarious stuff that the NFL has done over the years

to try to keep this out of the players awareness, keep it out of the public awareness. But they also do a really good job of getting across what life can be like for some of these players. And we should say for some of, people, even players with CTE found to have CTE after death, doesn't necessarily mean they're going to be suicidal or that they had Alzheimer's symptoms or anything like that.

But for the ones that do, they have a really rough life. And so does their families, as a matter of fact. And that really comes across in the documentary. Well, there's this one study they did that they took brains of 165 former football players. It could have been high school, college, NFL, or obviously all three if you went to the NFL. 131 of the 165, 79% had CTE.

And of the 91 that played in the NFL, 96% of them had CTE. Yep. And it's shocking. And they do make the point in this article that those who choose, whose families or individuals chose to donate their brains are probably people that likely have the CTE. Right.

When you're healthy, you're not thinking, I need to donate my brain to science afterwards. But that's what they need. What's going on. Sure. You know, they need all kinds of people, I mean, athletes to do this. Actually, there's a test that was kind of fortuitous

from UCLA, actually. People are trying to figure out how they can diagnose CTE in living people, right? And they have not figured it out yet. They're trying to figure out how to die the tau proteins in the brain to see accumulations and then check to see if there's beta amyloids, too. I bet they'll figure that out.

They will. But this UCLA researcher, a duo of researchers, found that they could check for the shrinkage of volume in parts of the brain and correlate those to ones that have been found through autopsies of football players with CTE, right? And they scanned some guy's brain still alive, former football player, has all the symptoms of CTE.

And crucially, he also had a MRI done like four years before. So they could compare his current brain size to what he had four years before and see the regions that were shrinking. And one region lost like 14% of its volume in just the four years. But they found that these regions correlate with stuff they're seeing in CTE in former football players.

So they're thinking, maybe they can use this as the test. Just look for shrinkage in different brain regions. Well, one thing they do know is that in 2008, they did a survey and the NFL, former NFL players get Alzheimer's at a rate about six times higher than the general population, which is no surprise. But like we were talking about earlier, that whole link to depression and suicide,

apparently, former NFL players are less likely to have depression and less likely to commit suicide, almost 60% less likely. I don't know that that says a whole lot, though. I don't think that disproves at all that depression and suicide can also be part of CTE. It smells like an NFL-funded study. Yeah, just, I don't know.

Something's not adding up with that. Yeah, again, if you watch League of Denials, you're going to question everything, everybody. It's weird. It's a really weird situation because on one side, you've got the NFL fighting for its life, throwing everything it can at money and lawyers, and doing really dirty stuff, like discrediting the doctors

involved, trying to get NIH researchers fired. And on the other side, you've got all of these incredibly well-educated, incredibly, in some cases, egotistical neurologists and neuro-researchers who are all vying to be like the one who makes the connection with CTE. The science is out there enough that someone can come along and be like, here, case closed.

Put my name on this. And there's a lot of gross stuff, like Junior Seau's brain had a lot of people after it, in just the hours after he died, and they were calling his family and emailing his family and bad-mouthing one another when they were talking to his son, saying, hey, give us the brain. You don't want to give it to Boston University. They're ghouls.

They'll probably eat some of it. It's just a weird situation that's going on. Yeah, very sad. Yeah, you got anything else? I do not. Well, that is CTE, and I can assure you there will be plenty more of that, because they're still figuring it out.

But if you want to know more about it in the meantime, type those letters into the search bar howstuffworks.com. Since I said search bar, it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this Halloween response. Hey, guys, I normally skip the Halloween podcast, because I'm not much a fan of ghost stories. But I thought it was broad daylight,

so I'll go ahead and listen. My first ghost story actually gave me the creeps. The reason I'm writing, though, is you pointed out that the majority of horror stories depict violence against women. Being a fan of horror movies is interesting. He doesn't like ghost stories, but he likes horror movies. They're different, but these aren't even ghost stories.

No. Being a fan of horror movies, I would be lying if I said it wasn't something I had wondered about myself after listening to some great true crime podcasts, though, of which there are many have concluded that the reason is that stuff is art imitating life. A lot of these movies or stories are based on true events.

Unfortunately, in the real world, violence against women, especially with serial killers, is far more common. When people set out to write horror, they usually research existing crimes to base ideas off of in order to make it more realistic and, in turn, more frightening. So it may be easier to change fiction to be less sexist. The real issue lies more in the world that we live in. And I guess we can probably convince

serial killers to start killing more men. We'll probably continue to see more violence. And so we do that. We'll see more violence against women in horror films. Never thought about that, James. It's a good point. It's a pretty good hypothesis, actually. It makes a great case.

Thanks, James. If you want to get in touch with us to say, hey, man, here's something smart. We love hearing that. You can tweet to us at S-Y-S-K podcast. You can join us on facebook.com slash stuff you should know. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast.howstuffworks.com. And as always, join us at our home on the web,

stuffyoushouldknow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends

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