Mental Health Blogs

The New York Times reported yesterday on an unpublished study of retired NFL players which shows a shockingly high rate of dementia in former players over 50 years of age. This comes on the heels of other research showing depression in former football players who’d suffered concussions during their playing days.

The prevalence of dementia in the 50 and above general population is a little over 1 percent. Among former NFLers over 50 researchers found it to be 6.1 percent, according to the paper. Players aged 30 to 49 had dementia at a 1.9 percent rate as opposed to the national average of .1 percent. The paper also notes that the study had some weakness in that it used a telephone survey method, but even if the numbers might be off a bit from what a harder scientific approach might show the results are very troubling.

I presume the dementia is related to concussions and that gives me a bit of concern for myself. I’ve experienced four full blown concussions in my life (one from skiing, one from hockey, one in a fight and one when I was attacked by a gang of 18-year-olds when I was 14) and I guess the time I saw stars at a high school football practice counts as a minor concussion. I guess I should start taking Aricept right now! Um, no.

I deeply love football (between college and the NFL, I watch seven games a week during the season), but it’s clear something needs to be done about the number of concussions suffered, especially at the youth level, and the number of deaths (usually a few and we had one in Washington State this week) and paralyzations each year. I wouldn’t begin to know what the solution is. Helmets are very, very good these days. The NCAA has banned head-to-head hits, but it’s kind of hard to prevent what happens naturally in the course of tackling someone. It’ll be interesting to see how the NFL addresses this matter or if it does at all.

I wrote about a spate of head injuries among high school football players in Oregon back in 2000.

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