Study reveals former football and rugby players six times more likely to have degenerative brain disease, CTE

Jeremy Wilson piece on dementia Pix show footballer Rod Taylor
CTE, as well as dementia with Lewy bodies, was fond in the brain of the former Portsmouth, Gillingham and Bournemouth wing-half Rod Taylor (left) Credit: Jay Williams

A groundbreaking new study into former football and rugby players with dementia has found that they were six times more likely to have Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, a degenerative brain disease associated with repetitive head trauma.

The research, which has been led by Dr Willie Stewart at the University of Glasgow, followed a donation programme that has been inviting families and even former players themselves to allow brains to be examined following their death. All those studied had played football or rugby over a long period and had suffered dementia.

CTE, which was previously known as dementia pugilistica and can only be definitively diagnosed in post-mortem, has long been associated with boxing, but increasingly now also other contact sports, including American Football, rugby and football. The symptoms can be confused during life with Alzheimer’s or others types of neurodegenerative disease.

Dr Stewart and his team found CTE in around 75 per cent of the brains of former football and rugby players they studied. This compares with a CTE prevalence of around 12 per cent in the brains of people with dementia in the general population.

“They have a range of pathologies but the one thing that is coming through that is striking in the group we have looked at, which actually mirrors what has been found in other places around the world, is that around three quarters of them have this CTE pathology in their brains,” said Dr Stewart.

“What we are talking is roughly about six times higher level CTE pathology in the brains of these former sportsmen than you would see in other dementias. One thing we do know is that the diagnosis in life is often refined or changed when you look at post-mortem.”

As reported last August by The Telegraph, Dr Stewart found CTE, as well as dementia with Lewy bodies, in the brain of the former Portsmouth, Gillingham and Bournemouth wing-half Rod Taylor. Dr Stewart previously also diagnosed CTE in Jeff Astle, the former England striker who died 17 years ago.

Appearing this week at the Scottish Cognitive Outcomes from Brain Injury Consortium, Dr Stewart told the former Scotland rugby international John Beattie, who now works for the BBC, that they were still at a “very early stage” of research.

“The really important thing we have to say is that we don’t understand what this mean in terms of the dementia,” he said. “Is it the cause of the dementia or is it just an indication that there has been an exposure to brain injury?”

Dr Stewart also acknowledged the inherent bias in a sample that had been largely donated due to existing concerns about the dementia cause and stressed the importance still of sport and exercise.

“We know that there are benefits to physical activity - we are less certain about the risks of head injury in the long term,” he said.

Dr Stewart is currently also leading research funded by the Football Association and Professional Footballers’ Association into the prevalence of dementia among former players.

Details on the Glasgow brain donation scheme can be found here

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