Future of football--from StarTrib opinion page

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Ole said:
Thanks!

Ok.

A few things:
1)I'm glad they are researching this, it's a legit study, it's done by real scientists, good. Knowledge is power.

2)Even these scientists didn't make conclusions that support a massive overhaul of the sport. In fact they cite several sources that find contrary to their data. About all you can pull from this is they are able to test a blood marker that seems to correlate with brain injury. They don't know what it does though, and it's not a perfect model since it's seen at widely varying levels in different patients.

3)They have a small amount of players to pull from here, which sounds like they couldn't herd a bunch of football players into the clinic consistently. I would expect they are going to work on a bigger study with a better distribution of ages, races, and other variables. They admit diet, environment, and socioeconomics are not accounted for.

4) In this small group they find a wide varying amount of their blood marker among players. In some it actually goes down over the season. In a few it skyrockets.

5)The big thing for me though is that they take baseline measurements of the players and find no correlation to the blood marker in players that have had concussions previously over those that didn't. So they are NOT drawing a conclusion that this blood marker remains high constantly. They hypothesize that short term spikes in the level could essentially cause an auto immune response, but don't conclude that.
They also don't add any comparative data on what the levels are like in other sports, daily activities, or possible cofactors like drinking, smoking. It's certainly possible they will do the same study in other sports and find similar results.

6)They are going to get to study this further, which is good. However since conspiracy theories are in play it should be noted that they are the patent holders for the detection of this blood marker they base this hypothesis from. It doesn't discount them from presenting good data, but it does beg for others to find independent ways of studying the potential for long term brain injuries in football players.

I'll add that the media links provided by this website hosting the paper DO draw conclusions. Which is irresponsible and the likely source of consternation among people interested in the subject.
There are over a dozen links claiming things this paper does not, just in their headlines.

Thanks for that. Still doesn't bring fear and imminent death upon all who play football though.
Click to expand...

Ole, that's a very reasoned response. I appreciate that. There are other articles as well. All you have to do is search for subconcussive head injuries. There are no smoking guns on this, just mounting correlative evidence that suggests repeated subconcussive collisions MAY be a factor in CTE and cognitive loss. It's important to note that the only real way to diagnose CTE right now is by autopsy...meaning they can't know until someone is dead and their family gives permission to examine the brain. It's like ALS in that sense...there's no conclusive test while one is alive.

As far as the conspiracy theory piece of what you wrote, that's of course why good peer review is important. Good scientific findings are opened up for the scrutiny of other scientists. They love nothing more than to prove each other wrong. It's part of the process and really good scientists enjoy and appreciate having their work critiqued. I do agree though that the media do a generally crappy job reporting on this stuff without understanding the limitations of studies and just to get a big headline.

As for me, my 9 year old played 3 years of flag football, which I coached. When it came time to move to tackle in 3rd grade and he wanted to try another sport, I didn't argue at all. If he wants to move back to football, we'll see. That will be a tough decision and I hope there's more evidence on all of this by the time we have to make that call.
 

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