Word: mckee
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...pain on Greg Hadley's face. The senior from Colgate University, a two-time all-conference linebacker on the school's football team, is sitting in a Bedford, Mass., laboratory, staring at shattered brains of dead football players. On this Friday afternoon, Hadley has come to visit Dr. Ann McKee, a Boston University neurological researcher who has received a dozen brains donated from former NFL, college and high school players. In each one, it's simple to spot a protein called tau, which defines a debilitating disease known as chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE. Common symptoms of CTE include sudden...
Hadley wants to see, in raw, microscopic detail, what could await him. All CTE victims have had some kind of head trauma, and Hadley has received four concussion diagnoses during his college days. As they examine images under a microscope, McKee tells Hadley that the brown splotches represent the dreaded tau buildup in the brain. The brains are as brown as the pigskin itself. (See "The Year in Health 2009: From...
...profits have come at the expense of the long-term mental health of those who play football. And perhaps more important, the young people emulating the actions of their NFL heroes are putting their futures on the line as well. "We need to do something now, this minute," says McKee, the brain researcher. "Too many kids are at risk...
...study commissioned by the NFL found that ex-pro players over age 50 were five times as likely as the national population to receive a memory-related-disease diagnosis. Players 30 to 49 were 19 times as likely to be debilitated. Of the dozen brains of CTE victims McKee has examined, 10 were from either linemen or linebackers; some scientists now fear that the thousands of lower-impact, or "subconcussive," blows these players receive, even if they don't result in documented concussions, can be just as damaging as - if not more so than - the dramatic head injuries that tend...
Help is already too late for Tom McHale, one of the CTE victims Hadley examined in McKee's lab. A nine-year NFL vet who became an ebullient restaurateur after he retired in 1995, McHale suddenly lost interest in his work - and life - about four years ago. He couldn't focus, fought addictions to painkillers and cocaine, and died of a drug overdose at a friend's apartment in 2008. McHale was 45. "He went in, lay down and didn't wake up," says his widow Lisa, a mother of three sons, ages...