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.
