Your Child Plays Football. How Can You Minimize Risk of C.T.E.?
New York Times · LC · trust 26/100
Researchers say it’s all about reducing the total number of blows to the head.
Listen · 4:37 min Share full article 419 Many medical experts encourage children to play flag football rather than the full-contact version. Credit... Brandon Thibodeaux for The New York Times By John Branch
Twenty years into the era of C.T.E. awareness, parents know enough to be worried but perhaps not enough to avoid the risks entirely.
Some lean into the positives of the game — among them, the joy and excitement it brings to families, the sense of community it builds, the multigenerational traditions it holds, and the lessons about teamwork and work ethic — and hope that, fingers crossed, C.T.E. is not looming inside the brain.
It’s a risk-reward calculation, one that the children might not be old enough to consider.
C.T.E., or chronic traumatic encephalopathy, is a progressive neurological disease caused by repeated hits to the head. That means it is largely preventable.
But it cannot be definitively diagnosed until death. Scientists are not sure why some people who play decades of football do not get it, while some teenagers do.
That uncertainty can be justification for the status quo. But new research shows that one in four ex-N.F.L. players who died over a recent six-year period had C.T.E. Scientists think the number is substantially higher, since most of those former players never had their brains examined.
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