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They're really destroys a person's life. That is shocking news, but medical professionals don't take it seriously. And they have a lot of need to present my findings, but it didn't believe me. And so there was a huge effort to really discredit me.
The other entity is a world leading real scientists who runs the world's biggest career. He's working around making research on a series like the writing, to find a plane sport. These injuries are acceleration, acceleration very rapidly and twisting on the brain. And that brings the nerve cells.
And then over time, the disease progresses and this protein called Tao. It's gained from and starts spreading through the brain. And we have lots of evidence that this is happening in context for it, but also in the military veterans to Mr. violence, etc.
And it causes depression, personality changes. The rest of the violent behaviors or maybe the person takes their own life. Look, Aaron Hernandez and why Graham, 18 years old, he was a memorable player. And he videotaped himself before taking his own life.
My head is pretty messed up in damage. The voices that he knew my head started to take over everything I wanted to do. He shot himself in the heart instead of the head, because it was his darling, which didn't his brain. Yeah.
I saw multiple CT lesions in many parts of his brain. What we're playing tackle football for several years. Yes. And every time you see it in a young person, you just can't get over it.
It's a lot for you to carry. There's some days that are darker than others, but we're not quite like us to be. What do we do about this? We have to.
What's okay? What is the mission that you're on in your life and your professional endeavors? Well, my mission in life has taken a rough change about 17 years ago when I first saw a CTE in the brain of a football player. And I realized that the play football was associated with a chronic and progressive nerdy genetic disease.
My first case is in football players are 45 year old men. And I was stunned to see CTE in their brains. 45 is extremely young for a nerdy genetic disease. And then my third case was actually an 18 year old where I saw the beginnings of CTE in the brain of a high school player.
And I've never looked back since then. When you talk to the families and you hear the tragedy that they experience the heartache of living with these people who change before their eyes, the personality changes, their mood changes, they become people they don't recognize. And then they live through an accidental death or maybe the person takes their own life and is the result of almost a coincidence of seeing that those changes in the brains of American football players. I immediately just wanted to eradicate this disease.
What is CTE? So CTE stands for chronic traumatic encephalopathy. And it's a nerdy genetic disease of the brain, which means it over time decades usually it gradually robs you of your ability to think clearly or remember things and ultimately you end up with dementia. What's interesting about CTE is that there's a cause, an environmental cause, it's triggered by trauma, specifically small repetitive hits to the head.
The kind that people don't even notice when a plane contacts for it, some of these hits result in concussion. But actually it's more importantly the sub-concussive or non-concussive hits that happen routinely in the play football and very often in the play of other contexts like ice hockey, bumpy and soccer. The disease starts out as isolated areas of abnormality in the brain, sort of spots in the brain in the cortex usually in the frontal lobes. And then over time as a person ages, even if they stop playing the sport, stop getting hit and hit in the head.
The disease progresses, the tau that started very vocally and very restricted areas start spreading through the brain. It invades the areas that are important for memory and learning. It takes over the brain stem, it causes motor problems, memory problems, cognitive problems, and it really destroys a person's life. And some of the sports in life style choices that I like to encourage CTE.
You mentioned the NFL's American football we mentioned soccer which is heading for fighting. Fighting in ice hockey certainly. Boxing, boxing, MMA, yeah. The military.
The military is also at risk after blast injury or combat related injuries. Also, very high percentage of military veterans play contact sports as the same demographics that they have combined risk. Domestic violence. Domestic violence is definitely one of the triggers for CTE.
It may not be as risky. It may not pose as greater risk as something with very sustained heavy impact like football. But certainly if the domestic violence is longstanding and repetitive over years, yes, women have been reported with CTE. I didn't realize the brain's a stretch on.
These injuries are acceleration, deceleration very rapidly and twisting of the brain and the brain stretches as it's going in a linear direction and it twists as it's going in a rotational direction. And not actually phrase the nerve cells that you're actually twisted and distorted. And it also injures the blood vessels, the long elements in the brain. So we see vascular injury usually to the small blood vessels and we see damage to the nerve cells.
So what do you do on a day to day? What have you been doing for the last 17 years? If I was to come and see what would I see? And where'd I see you working?
So we have a lab. It's a neuro pathology lab and we specialize in we have several brain banks. You would see me the second brain, what are graphing brains and then most likely you'd see me looking under the microscope at brains. And how many brains have you seen?
Oh, I was thinking about that earlier. I think it's very close to 10,000 at this point. So to be a data changer career, you got to look at that first brain that had signs of CTE. And what did you see?
I was starting Alzheimer's disease. I had a man that came into the bank in 2003 who was named Paul Pender. He was a boxer. A famous boxer in the Boston area.
And he twice fought a sugar in Robinson for the world title. So he came in with the diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease into our Alzheimer's bank. And everybody thought it was Alzheimer's disease because he retired from boxing about four years before he died. And everyone felt this related to boxing that was shown up earlier.
So when I looked at that brain, it was very obvious right from the minute I looked at it, it was an Alzheimer's disease because Alzheimer's has been animal attacks. You have to have them to make the diagnosis. This guy had no bad animal attacks. But what he did have was this protein called Tao and using our stains, it's stains brown.
and this Tao was all over his brain. And in the most peculiar regions, it was circling around small blood vessels. It was clustered at the crevices of the brains. It was involving nuclei in the brain that are not involved in Alzheimer's.
It was involving the cerebellum. It was the most curious disease. And I scientifically became extremely interested in finding out more about how boxing could promote this kind of neurodegeneration. And then it was some five years later that I had the opportunity to look at a American football player's brain.
So I looked at the first case, John Grimsley, 45 when he died. And I looked at it, I couldn't believe my eyes. I couldn't believe that a 45 year old man could have this amount of Tao in his brain, could have this amount of degeneration. It just doesn't happen that early.
Neurodegenerative diseases are primarily diseases of aging. So 70s, 80s, unless you maybe have a genetic component that comes on in your 50s. But 45 is extraordinarily early. And I couldn't look over.
It was monumentally interesting from a scientific point of view that an exposure trauma could cause this kind of brain damage. And then what was really interesting as opposed to Alzheimer's disease is because trauma was causing it, there was a possibility we could map it from the earliest trauma to its last manifestations. Then there's the emotional component of the cognitive families and just wanting to be their advocate. I realized very quickly that if I didn't speak out for these families, we were experiencing this tragedy, this devastation, this death of their loved one who would change before their eyes.
Nobody else was. I've got some brain scans of someone who has advanced CTE here in front of me and it is quite frankly horrific. Yeah. Versus the normal brain on the left, which will come as green for everybody to see in the down below for anyone that's just an audio.
But I mean, the only way I can describe it is it looks like the brain has died. Yeah, it's all shriveled. Haven't been any studies done to figure out how many focal players, soccer players, etc., people are playing these with high contact sports, have the early signs of these neurodegenerative diseases that show a brain that brain. Oh, if they're in a failed players, it's over 95%, it varies.
You know, it's 95% and not. The last time we looked at college players, it was 90%. 90%. Yes.
That was not that said, in 2000, we found that more than 40% of brains from contact sport players who died before H30 had CTE with Kim at Boston University. Yeah. That was our study last August. And in that study, we started 152 athletes and we found like 63% had a sign to CTE early CTE so about 41% of CTE.
That is shocking news. That is, that is the entity we have to address this disease. These are kids. They had no reason for their lives to end so early.
So we have to address this. Even if the risk is small for high school players or college players, which I don't think is true, I think for college is actually quite substantial. We have to address this to keep our kids safe. Most people, most parents want their kids to live long productive lives.
And this is a disease that cuts them down, cuts down their potential early in life. And I said from New University as well, I said that 345 out of the 376 former NFL players, which is 92% of your study had CTE in their brains. And how does this disease impact that person's life? Because these children are playing sports, whether it's an historical rugby or American football right now.
They're probably not seeing the symptoms in their everyday life. You're telling me that the symptoms will show up essentially if they do that at CTE. What are those symptoms? You've seen the loss of that.
We can see symptoms quite early. We have found in that study of 152 young athletes, they were all symptomatic. And those symptoms generally are depression, very common, emotional mobility, irritability, impulsivity for judgment making poor choices. There can be aggressive in violent behaviors, physical and even verbal violence and a short few.
So a small infraction causes them to have an exaggerated hostile response. And then you can even develop memory loss and cognitive change even in these young athletes. In general, the symptoms develop later, maybe four years later, a decade later. And they generally show up again as these behavioral and mood symptoms, a personality change.
And as a person gets older, they start to be memory loss, difficulty thinking, cognitive loss, and then ultimately, dementia, almost everyone who has a beard disease. And you can give me some case studies that have reason out to you as it makes the symptoms showing early, but also showing up in a really intense way. Yeah, I mean, there was, we actually did a deep dive in several of the players and families that were in that 2023 paper about the young athletes. And there's a very compelling video on the New York Times website of an 18 year old Wyatt Bramwell.
What he tells you in this self-tape, he actually videotaped himself before taking his own life. And it's a very tough take to watch. Hello. So this is the sitting next to my name, which is wrong with me.
I've been depressed for a long time. My head is pretty messed up in damage. The voices and demons in my head just started to take over everything I want to do. I took a lot of hits through full full, a lot of hits through full full full full full full full of lock and cushion and a lot of times I never told anybody about how I was feeling in my head after a hit.
You know, I just had to play which was not smart on my head. I know that. Dad, I know you're capable of doing this and I want you to do it. After my funeral, which will be open to ask you, I won't my brain donate it to be studied.
I feel like a bit closer for me and I'll be closer for you guys to know that maybe why it's suffered from brain damage. Maybe that was the reason. So do that for yourself. I would like that to be done.
I'll only only have you that I'm free and I can rest because my life for that's when you're just going to be held inside my head. I love you and goodbye. It's the same story over and over with these young athletes saying there's something wrong. They're not thinking clearly.
They can't really easily put their finger on it. If they go to seek help, a lot of times medical professionals don't take it seriously or don't think it could possibly be related to the playing of a ball or other contact boards. And so they're dismissed. Sometimes they're dismissed and that also contributes to their despair and deep depression.
As you're saying, I just pulled up and I'll talk about why it's and it is heartbreaking. The also said in 2019, just myself graduating from high school 18 years old, he took his own life about a year later research at your university. I noticed him with stage two CTE caused by playing tackle football for several years. So did you look at his brain?
I did. I saw multiple CTE lesions in many parts of his brain. You think I get used to it. But every time you see it in a young person, you just can't get over it.
You just, it stops you in your tracks. It just makes you stop everything and wonder why aren't people doing more to prevent this disease? We now have the knowledge. We just have to take action.
Why some other suspects hear me what he was doing when he took his own life. He shot himself in the heart instead of a head. Christie Bramwell, his mother said it was her son's language to donate his brain to CTE research and the only way to diagnose a disease is to an autopsy of the brain. It's just a great heart.
He was desperate. And he wanted people to know if he did seek help, I'm not sure he did. But if he had, I don't think anyone would have understood what was causing it. And this is the disconnect.
We have lots of evidence that this is happening in amateur sports, especially American football, other sports as well. And yet, and this is a disease that is entirely preventable. If I start to play American football or some kind of sport that involved a lot of head trauma when I was younger, if I start to talk about when I was younger, I was trying to spend 10 years old on that playing an impressive team. And then I play up until I was maybe 18 roughly years old.
If I carry on doing that, what age would in your opinion? If I was the average player, the first signs of this dramatic brain injury that the BCTE start to show, because I'm thinking about primary legal players in the UK, so I'll play some UK. They often start five years old. They play until they're 35 years old.
And what we do tend to see is we see mental health issues. We have to see alcoholism. I'll wait a couple of different health issues. Yeah.
And other forms of compulsive behavior. I wonder if I was an equal woman. If it's cancer up as soon as they're 40s. Yeah.
We definitely have a collegiate soccer player with CTE, the first American, first American case of CTE and woman. We even have a high school soccer player with early CTE. So what we don't know about soccer because we have fewer brain donations from soccer players. We develop the dose, you know, years of play versus CTE that we have developed for these other sports.
So, you know, that is one of the studies that we're hoping to do is start the brains of soccer players maybe collaborate with places like Brazil or the UK or soccer is the predominance board. And if these people were to die, you know, analyze their brain and that would not enable us to develop a response, a dose response curve with a number of years played and risk for CTE. Have you seen that at USC? I have not.
For kind of an A. Yeah. It's brutal, right? It's brutal.
It's brutal. It's brutal. It's brutal. It's brutal.
It's brutal. It's a boxing. It's a culture published in 1928 in boxers and it described the symptoms that boxers developed if a state in the ring too long and that was called punch drunk. And then later that, uh, no one played your gut change to dementia, pugilistic gut because they thought it happened primarily in pugilistic boxers.
And then through the years, there's slow recognition that it could happen to individuals who had other causes of hits to the head, uh, ultimately like American football players, but there was a circus clown that we had a long hits to the head that developed CTE. So people started realizing that it's not exclusive to boxers. It's actually anyone who gets repetitive hits to the head. It was described in an older woman who was a product of domestic violence.
And that's why they had to sort of make it a broader term and that was when CTE was really accepted as a term. And explain simply for someone who doesn't know anything about brain. How does CTE develop? What's going on?
Is there a way to simply explain it to me? Yeah. Well, it is based on the physics of the injury, that acceleration deceleration, the stretch of the brain, it causes the brain to be damaged in the parts of the brain that get the most stress, the most strain. So you could actually think of the most, uh, physical displacement.
That's where you see the damage to the brain. And it almost always is in the frontal lobes, but at the crevices of the brain is where it starts. So we see the earliest stages of the crevices because those get the most shearing and it also starts around blood vessels because the blood vessels have a certain visceral elastic property and then the brain around it has another and so there's another shearing force around the blood vessels. So the physics of the injury, the physics of the traumatic acceleration deceleration, uh, uh, determined where the brain is interfirst and that's crevices and around blood vessels.
And that's exactly what you see in stage one of stage two CTE. So if I'm constantly heading before, I'm playing soccer, constantly heading before, like this, my brain is moving forward and backwards. And it's just the stretch. And when it stretches, something is happening that isn't like a bruising or they can call shot to a, it's a shearing force.
So you have a tissue that's being stretched, the elements inside the tissue are also being stretched and they're going to break. There's going to be damage that caused by the sudden elongation that's going to snap some of the fibers and, and, and, and, and, and, and injuries on the blood vessels. So having time to talk about the head of the head of the ball for that time. I don't know.
Um, you know, we aren't, if they had accelerometers and headbands with soccer players, we might know the answer to that question, but obviously we don't. And, um, so, but we do know that, you know, years of play in football, uh, is associated with risk. In fact, for every 2.6 years of American football, it doubles your risk for CTE. Uh, there's a somewhat lower risk, uh, I kind of agree with exactly right now.
The number of years of, uh, I saw that you need to play to double your risk for CTE somewhat lower and rugby also has a dose response relationship. And the three is, yeah, this, and she does impact soccer and the record football. Um, I was reading about a case of a guy called Jeff Astell, who was a ex England striker. He, um, he was a score of a win goal in the 1968 F.A.
Cup final and he died from CTE in 2002, age 59. So this is an impact soccer place as well. I think you've met his family. I have met his family, uh, and we also have an America at least five professional soccer players, uh, all of whom have had CTE.
The doctor who examined Jeff's brain, so he couldn't believe it. He was looking at the brain of 59 year olds. He thought it was the brain of a 90 year old. Um, in 10 years before Jeff died, he was struggling with memory loss, forgetfulness, depression, anxiety, and obviously once, once he passed away and they got to, by sex his brain, they've realized why the resistance you faced.
Yeah. So talking about the journey that you've been on to try and change people's minds, because if I was running the NFL or even the Premier League or the, I know what the ice hockey league is called or, um, boxing or UFC, the news that you're telling me today and the research that you've done is a threat to me, my industry, my business and my project margins. Absolutely. Yeah.
So I imagine people aren't happy with message that you have to share in the research that you're doing. No, they weren't. And also it's America's favorite sport and it defines culture, football's almost a religion in the United States, you know, people equate football with patriotism and, you know, loving the U.S. It has a lot of connotation football defines communities, it defines colleges and universities.
So the love of football is, uh, is huge. I think even in the UK, you know, you fanatical fans, right? It's quite something. Even beyond the financial aspects, we all just have these massively strong feelings about the play of these sports.
And so coming up and saying, you know, the play of these sports and some people is damaging their brains and actually leading to their death was, was not met with the anything through the Azom. And so there was a huge effort to really discredit me. And those were difficult years because my integrity was, was so question. It's hard to take, it's hard to take people challenging your truthfulness.
And, you know, people said I was a fraud and I was, uh, taking the data and, you know, all, really, it goes on and on. The only thing that kept me going was knowing that I was speaking for the families. And I'm, I was speaking for them. I was there advocate.
And I also knew that this was blatantly real. I could see it under the microscope. It was obvious to me. It's not something that happens normally.
It's not something that happens with aging. It's not Alzheimer's disease. It's not, uh, the non-condition. All of those things were thrown at me many, many times.
I'm back to still hear them today sometimes. And over the years, I kept thinking, well, if we have enough data in enough players and we publish enough journals and, you know, have enough science data, you know, we are gradually going to be able to wear this down to the point where people take it seriously. And we have gotten to that point. We are taken more seriously.
Our CTE is now a disease that's recognized by the national institutes of health. So it's easier now. What if there's still considerable controversy? I also read that so 15 years ago.
You got a call from the NFL. They contacted you and they wanted to talk. Why did they contact you? So our first case was in February of 2008.
That's when I got my first brain. And we announced the findings in, uh, later in the year in 2008. Over the next year from 2008 to 2009, we accumulated more cases. I believe it was around 10.
And we had published a paper, we published a paper of our experience on CTE. So after that paper was published in September, I got a call from the NFL in November, November 2009 saying that they wanted me to come to New York and present my findings. He was in the ring. The chairmen of the, of the Smiles TBI committee, Ira Cassen and colleagues as well as some owners of teams.
How did he go? Well, it was, it fell in deaf ears. It was pretty humiliating. It was, they didn't believe me.
They sort of, I remember one of them said, is there somebody, is there some other doctor that can address these findings? It was just, it was just massive denial and dismissiveness. And, um, you know, it felt humiliating as a bad word. I didn't accomplish much.
What do they think it was? Because if you look at something like this, you know, if I'm on CTE and it's bring out in front of me, I mean, Katie, something is wrong. Something's wrong. It wasn't, it wasn't related to the playful ball.
How did you leave that they feeling? Very, very discouraged feeling like, you know, marginalized. I'll be honest, as a woman in medicine, I was one of the earlier women in medicine. You, you've experienced being dismissed.
You've experienced being talked over. You've experienced having your opinion a little. And so it was just sort of a more focused experience of that. I didn't so cute.
No, it didn't stop me because the brains kept coming in, you know, it's tragedy. You see tragedy after tragedy after tragedy, you're going to keep going. And you can see the evidence. I could see the evidence.
This is true. You mentioned families alone. Yeah. Well, we talked to the families.
I do my analysis. I then find out, you know, they were like clinically because the analysis is always done not knowing anything about their clinical state. I don't know how many, how long they play football. I don't know if they were to.
I don't know anything about that. So I do it on bias blinded to the clinical symptoms. But then after I do my analysis, they're talking to the family. And I get to experience the reaction to it and how they feel, you know, obviously it brings up the death.
It brings up all the emotions of the, of the loved one dying. It's a very often emotional call. And, but it's actually one of the most rewarding as a physician. It's, it's one of my most rewarding times because I get to, I can't heal the living, but I can't heal the virus.
And I can help them with the knowledge that is often comforting to them. It explains things. The person didn't hate them. They just had brain damage and they were, they were limited and they didn't, you know, their actions were because they, they felt negatively towards them.
They just couldn't control it. And somehow that, that, that brings their loved one back to where they remember them best. It brings them back to the person they were before the disease started while they married them. It brings their father back to the father that loved them, not the one that scorned them.
And it explains for parents why a child might have done terrible things, including maybe it had contributed to an accidental injury or taking his life. And that knowledge is very comforting. It helps the family heal. It's very, very hard year after year to keep on and there's some days that are different than others.
There's many days where I feel it's just too much, it's too much because we're not making much progress. You know, there hasn't been a lot of acceptance. I mean, incremental labor light years ahead of where we were 17 years ago, but we're not where I'd like us to be. And it can be very frustrating.
But I can't give up the torch. I can't give up the work because who, I, who will do it, who will do it. And I think at this point we have the most experience with it. We can do it best.
Was there a moment where the NFL started to change their minds? Because I read that in 2013 and I've reached of 765 million dollars settlement with thousands of retired plays and families affected by accumulated brain injuries, promising to pay every form of play who's about brain disease linked to concussions. Yes. And they paid for CTE before 2015.
So anyone who was diagnosed with CTE 2015 and before got compensated for CTE, but no one after. They also compensated for Alzheimer's disease, ALS and Parkinson's disease, but they don't, they do not compensate for CTE any longer. Anyone who's developed CTE has come into the brain bank to diagnose with CTE. That is not a reimbursable condition.
According to that settlement. Why? They dodged their gut, you know, smart lawyers. They know what a doubt about it.
But they still looking to be presumably family's a social issue. Well, there's, I think families are. In terms of that lawsuit, that was settled and it was settled probably too quickly because it compensated the players who were suffering at that time, but it didn't compensate future players. This is a real bonus.
Yeah. Can you tell me about this real bonus? He's a miracle for the player. He depends on what I knew who also took his life at very age.
Exactly. Yeah. I mean, all of these cases, I remember so well, even though it was a long time ago now. Yes.
Owen Thomas was a U-pen player. He had no conduction or something about, and he was a apparently an excellent student, but was having some troubles with his studies was not focusing quite unexpectedly. He took his own life and I examined that brain. And I remember it was late at night.
I was preparing to go home. Sometimes I like to look at the cases after the lab is quieted down to sort of just, you know, focus and think about things. And I remember looking at his brain and seeing very clear evidence of CTE and just being, you know, you're just blown away. You're sort of, it's sort of like the air goes out of you.
You just sort of count, believe it. He's 21. 21. It just seems insane.
And I remember talking to his parents and his parents were very surprised. They were surprised by his suicide. There hadn't been any warning signs and they were very surprised that he had this disease that they never heard of. And what was the cause of that disease in your opinion?
Because he was playing football, very clearly. I've got an American football helmet over here. I remember actually seeing him before. I was looking at any of the football equipment.
I was shocked by how thick and heavy it is. Yeah. I think that's an older model. So I think they're thicker and heavier now.
And there's so much padding inside here. Yeah. I mean, they look like they're completely protecting the person. But the injury for this disease is happening inside the helmet and inside your cell.
If you think about it, the skull is nature's helmet and the brain is tethered by your spinal cord, but it actually, there's some fluids surrounding it. So your brain is moving inside the skull. And no matter how big and thick and protective that helmet is, it's not changing the movement of your brain, which is a soft substance, not exactly like cello, but it elongates. It can twist and turn.
And that is happening beneath the helmet beneath the skull. But that does what the helmets were designed for, Mr. Prevent Skull fractures and skull fractures lead to hemorrhages in the brain, bleeds in the brain and sudden death. And that's why a helmet was developed.
So people would stop dying on the American football field. So protects the bone, but not the brain. Exactly. Yeah.
So pretty useless. I don't think your brain is going to be accelerating and decelerating. Yes. Well.
Okay. So I've got some diagrams in front of me here for four stages of CTE. And on the left hand side, I've got this stage one where you've got the odd spot of this ground substance. The ground substance you use to sort of highlight the towel.
We identify towel. It's also chemical reaction. How you develop a photograph. And so it tags the town.
And it turns it brown. So we can see it. All the brown areas of the area of the towel has been identified. So what I was wondering is in this stage one, there's a couple of instances.
And then stage two, there's more in stage three is quite drastic shift. It's a drastic shift. It's like big clusters. And stage four, you've really got the whole brain or it's half over the brain has been got by this towel substance.
Right. Is the difference between stage one and stage four here? Just more hits to the brain. Or is it if left alone, can it go from stage one to stage four without further impact?
It can go from one to four with aging. Okay. So it's a disease of aging. They're the more likely they are to have severe CTE.
But it's also the number of years of play. So here's a big closure. Does play into it. If you're a picture and age of individual death, then determine severity.
Okay. So if I stopped at stage two, I was playing sports at stage two. I said it wasn't individual anymore. Like domestic providers, we didn't cause it.
It would progress even if I was in contact. Yeah. Okay. And we think that's obviously we need to know why that is.
And some of the theories are there's tremendous inflammation in the brain, even after just the hits before the towel. So inflammation may feed the towel because there's a linear relationship between inflammation and towel. Once you have more towel, you get more inflammation. So you can see there's a vicious cycle.
But we're looking into other things. get worse with time. We could prevent a lot of the ultimate devastation. And in terms of the young people that you've looked at, the brains of Italian people, what stage do you see?
In the young people, it's almost all stage one and two, except in unusual cases. Like Aaron Hernandez was 27 when he died. He had stage three. Sorry, Aaron Hernandez is widely known for those that don't know.
Could you miss summary of so he was a very high level high functioning football player for the New England Patriots, you know, from the New England area, which I'm from. He was given a $40 million contract, and he played with Tom Brady and Rob Gronkowski on the Super Bowl winning teams, and he was really considered a superstar on the team. There was evidence that he was having some social difficulties. You know, rumors of criminal activity, and he ultimately was charged with murder and went to trial for murder.
And then he, I believe, you know, he had another trial, also involving the murder of three people. Starting the pending Aaron Hernandez of murder, what's that United Workers? People working in the first few weeks. United Workers, I wish theory what theory, the immigrant meditation and work through across the New England.
It's been across the Oklahoma. He ended up while he was in jail for the first criminal trial taking his own life at the age of 27, and he did donate his brain to my center. His family did. How much do you see when you go to his brain?
He had a large brain, which is not uncommon for a football player. The external surface looked perfectly normal. When I first saw it, I thought he's not going to have it. You know, it looks good.
There was no obvious damage. But then when we started doing that deception, we sliced through the brain corollantly, and I could see that his ventricles, the chambers at the inside of the brain, they were dilated. They were larger than they should have been, which means that there's been a shrinkage of the brain tissue. And then there was a membrane that divides the two halves of the brain, and instead of being a nice membrane, it had giant holes in it.
Those are called sensations, and that's a sign of brain trauma, because the fluid is banging against that curtain and ripping at it, causing holes. And I'd never seen demonstrations in anyone under the 845, and that actually was a person with CT that was a rugby player. So that was shocking to me. And then I thought when I saw that, oh, he probably is going to have CTE.
And then when I looked under the microscope, it was just shocking. It's like, you think you've been amazed or floored by these brains that have come. And then there's another one, and you're just, you're just, you're just always astonished at what can happen. So his frontal lobe, really, his frontal lobe from the back to the front was really riddled with how.
It was almost as though he had a non-functioning frontal lobe. And so I can't say that his actions were related to the CTE that he had in his brain, but it's impossible for me to conceive that it didn't contribute in some way. You just don't have that extensive frontal lobe disease without seeing changes to your behavior, in your decision again. Well, it's a case frontal lobe.
Yeah. Yeah. And what does that mean? So when you lose your frontal lobe, you lose your inhibition.
You know, your frontal lobe sort of dampens sort of inner urges. So if you become very frontal lobe, you talk without thinking, you don't have a filter. And you do aggressive, maybe impulsive acts with no filter either. And you have poor judgment, you have poor executive functioning.
You don't have to focus very clearly. So to me, yes, many, some of his symptoms indicate a frontal lobe damage. I looked at the view of Michael Webster, who was a former NFL center, one of the greatest I'm told. No, I'm talking about...
No, I'm too trained to find... Yeah, I would probably want to try with a kid. I was different than that. I'm just saying the things we do to one another, okay.
I don't know what I'm saying. I'm just starting to compute right now. I can't see it. I can't see it.
I can't see it. I can't see it. I can't see it. I can't see it.
I can't see it. I can't see it. I can't see it. I can't see it.
I can't see it. I can't see it. He's clearly struggling. Oh, he's a mess.
And I think that really for me, it's life. What do we do about this? About the disease? About everything you said.
You said, you've done this for 17 years. You talked in the progress that you want to see. Yeah. In the context for sports in general are extremely important to the psychosocial development of our children.
I don't want these sports to go away. But I do want us to acknowledge that the brain is fragile, but the brain can be very adversely affected if we don't pay attention to how many times we're hitting these kids in the head. And that's the bottom line. You cut out the heads of the head.
You cut out this disease. It's entirely preventable. Some of my say, but how we take hits of the head out of soccer. And the effort is in the end of sport.
In rugby, we have to be in the head of the sport work. When kids learn how the ball will be done to tackle boxing, how we take the head out of boxing. You see, hugely, how was that? One of the first points were the main, and you seen how was that.
No. and someone smashes you in that in head with that and huge sports, there are a bunch of many of the views across the internet. They're going to be bigger than you have to say, we can't take hits that head out of these sports. Surely this is just what you're thinking.
Well, that and some of these sports are just downright dangerous. And people are going to choose to participate in these dangerous sports. But for young children, children in high school, children in adults in college, they need to know the risks and we need to tell them. And they need to be able to think that the risks are acceptable.
And we need to educate parents and coaches and the athletes that this can be a consequence of playing a long career in these contact sports. We can take the hits out by changing full contact, putting an age limit when they can do full contact. You don't have to play football all through high school, to be a good football player in college. You could develop ball skills and athletic skills without the head contacts.
And probably be just as good a player. We've turned our, we just have ignored the clearly risky behavior that's in these sports. We could take heading out of soccer. It is football after all.
It is something you could play entirely with the foot. Now, that may not please the fans or the current players, but it's not inconceivable that we could take heading out of soccer. But we have to take it out for everyone. Otherwise, people would be discriminated against.
We didn't head the ball. I talk, you can take the fights out. You can certainly limit checking and clearly clearly dangerous behaviors. But anybody else in monitor the players, we could actually pay attention to how many times they're getting hit.
We could start monitoring athletes from beginning of season to end of season. There are ways to look at the brain, other scans, there's other neuro psychs. We could be monitoring athletes. If they're going down their own path, if things look like they're turning south, we're right now we're turning a blind eye to it.
We're doing nothing. Hoping it'll all go away. I'll go away. And then none of this will be really reality.
But that's how it works. People want to go away. I think people want all these signs to go away. If you're not probably going to listen to this, it's a message from one of our sponsors on the podcast, which is LinkedIn.
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That's LinkedIn.com slash D O A C. Hands on the convention supply. My question is about Alzheimer's. You mentioned many people to bring people to have Alzheimer's.
Bit of some question, but what is the difference between Alzheimer's and dementia? Where is it the same thing? Yeah, it's a great question because everybody is confused. So dementia is sort of this general term, a D-mentia, which means a loss of your mental abilities, you know, D-mentating.
So loss of cognition, cognitive abilities dementia. There are many subcategories of dementia, causes of dementia. The most common cause of dementia is Alzheimer's disease. It's the most common age related cause of dementia.
But then under Alzheimer's, there's also Parkinson's disease with Louis body disease. There's something called front to temporal lobear degeneration. Then there's, you know, you get into otter and rare diseases progressive super nuclear policy, uh, comedian dementia. And somewhere down there is also CTE.
So CTE is a cause of dementia. Okay. And how I avoid getting it out of time is well, you know, it's a very common disease. It's supposedly in over 50% of people that live to the age of 85.
If you look at their brains, half of them would have Alzheimer's disease. Not everyone gets the symptoms of Alzheimer's disease 85, but they have pathology. Now, I think you can do to lessen the symptoms of Alzheimer's disease are, you know, saying socially connected using your brain, challenging your brain, because high cognitive reserve, high cognitive ability, uh, give you strength, brain, strength, brain resilience against these diseases. So even if you have pathology, you can circumvent the areas of injury and areas that are working well and not experience the symptoms.
So that's one thing. You have physical activity fitness, but also mental fitness, challenging your brain, keeping it active, developing a high cognitive reserve. And then the other thing you can do is stay fit, right? Cardiovascular health is intimately connected to Alzheimer's disease.
You want to avoid high blood sugar diabetes because that can definitely hasten Alzheimer's disease. So it's really a story of saying healthy alcohol. Well, alcohol can damage your brain and alcohol damages it in entirely different ways than Alzheimer's or CTE. But if you, if you do drink alcohol, it can exacerbate your symptoms.
It can make your symptoms worse. And, you know, we don't have any direct connection between alcohol and Alzheimer's. But, you know, we do know that it's not good for your brain health, damages parts of the brain that can lead to cognitive problems. All these diseases increasing.
No, I think our awareness of these diseases is increasing. You know how we used to call it senile dementia, like, oh, yeah, it's just getting old. So, you know, we sort of dismissed it as just old age. But there's something that lived in very old ages that are perfectly in fact.
So these are abnormal aging. These are pathological aging. And we're much more aware that than we were say four years ago. Four years ago, we really had no concept how common this disease was.
Is there anything that you believe about the brain that most people disagree with? So do this day. Well, I can't think so. It has an example of Alzheimer's and CTE.
There's some fundamental beliefs that you're currently trying to prove out through your testing and the things you're doing across the university. Well, I do. I, you know, I have my own theories. I don't know if other people don't believe them.
But I do feel that inflammation, anything that causes inflammation in your brain. And I think a lot of people agree with me. The inflammation is one of the key promoters of brain disease and early generation. So there's tremendous inflammation in Alzheimer's disease, tremendous inflammation in CTE.
And if we could figure out sort of this bad inflammation, we might be able to prevent or at least stave off these terrible diseases. And the other thing that I think is very important is small vessel disease, vascular disease. The health of these small blood vessels that are so important to in terms of giving oxygen and eating a brain. If they become damaged or injured through a variety of mechanisms, then we also see these diseases being accelerated.
So, you know, I think there needs to be a lot more attention to the earliest changes that are associated with these diseases. And in my mind, those are vascular changes and inflammation. And I think it's causing inflammation in the brain. Really, any insult to the brain.
Certainly, if the blood vessels are damaged and they come leaky, you get substances leaking into the brain that irritate the brain and cause tremendous inflammation. The brain, blood brain area is a very tight barrier. You can have all sorts of toxins in your blood, but they're not getting into your brain. It's such a tight barrier between the blood and the brain.
We keep out all sorts of notches substances. But if you injure the blood vessels, they leak. And all those things that we are trying to keep out of our brain leak into the brain and promote inflammation, those changes can facilitate neurodegeneration. And the things that may cause those blood vessels to come injured.
Well, trauma. Well, trauma. And there's a lot of things that affect vascular health, like high blood pressure, high cholesterol, blood sugar, exactly. High cortisol.
Yeah. Yeah. You're just, I guess. You're just, you want to stay physically fit.
You want to eat, right? It's, we all know that what you need to do. It's just the things that sleep, you know, sleep is so important for, uh, because at the end of the day, you're asleep, you're actually clearing bad substances out of your brain. You have a clearance system in your brain that is most active when you sleep.
And so when you're sleeping, it's pulling out the notches chemicals. It's draining them into your, into your system so you can get rid of them. So sleep is also critically important. We probably have a few million parents listening at the moment.
This conversation. You know, parents, you know, that kids are saying, I want to play, I want to play soccer, I want to play American football, I want to do, uh, key, all these kinds of things. What do you say to those parents? Well, you know, every, parent is different, every child's different.
You have to really understand your child. Is it, is it that they need to play that particular sport? Or could it be as just as easily, uh, you know, could it be just as happy in a non-contact sport? There are plenty of non-contact sport.
There are plenty of sports that have low risk. So I would promote all of those. And then if they're playing the shoes, if they think, you know, this is a decision that they want to make despite the risks, then, you know, make sure the coach is very, very well-driven, and, you know, first in some of the adverse consequences of concussions. And those hits that are hidden in the non-contrastination.
Make sure that there's good education, good education, uh, of the player as well as the teammates as well as the coach. And then, you know, try to delay, play in full contact as long as possible. I think you should delay it until the person physically robust as, uh, with a musculature with a strong neck, they're able to, you know, resist hits. There's, you know, blindsided hit is much more damaging than I hit that you're expecting because you set your, your neck, you're expecting the hit and it doesn't cause the whiplash that, that a blindsided hit cause.
And what if the NFL is listening right now, the chairman of the NFL doesn't try to be totally grounded? Because I do know, because people know that there are people that are the biggest sports teams in the world that are in charge of type performance. And I actually, I mean, a couple of weeks ago with someone who's at one of the big teams in the world, who's in charge of type quality, and they listen frequently to the positive episodes. So what do you take those in?
They just have a power to make change. I'd say do more about the non-contrastination hits. There's been a lot of awareness of concussion management, but the important hits are the hits that don't cause symptoms are not considered concussion. Find ways to limit them on number of hits to the head in the sport.
Take hits out of practice, uh, encourage players to start full contact later. Lead by example. Show that the sub-contrastination non-contrastination are something to be limited and show leadership. By showing that you're addressing these non-contrastination hits effectively.
We have a potential on the podcast where they'll ask you the questions and the next guest. Oh, no, no, who they're leaving it for? Oh my goodness. I'm going to ask you the same.
Can you take me to your darkest day? What happened and what made it so dark? Well, my darkest day, probably many days, um, is when I don't have complete confidence in myself. And I doubt myself and I, I, I, I, I don't want to go forward because I think I'm not capable.
And the contrary of that is that this work came about because I believed in myself. I believed I was seeing the truth. I believed it was true and actual. It wouldn't have happened if I'd let my doubts and myself limit me.
So I would say to the answer that question is believe in yourself and take it to where it needs to go. Thank you so much. You're a pioneer and you started a conversation over the last decade or so that has really had huge impact on the world and people's opinion about subject matter. But before them, it's so invisible to me.
The research you've been able to continue to do, I can say a lot of people's lives that you're never going to get to me. But just say the lives, but ultimately extends their health span and make their lives more joyous. Not just that life is more but also their family. So I know I can imagine it feels afraid for straightening when you're staring at reality in truth every single day, but then you're looking to a world that can't see or appreciate essentially that you see.
And how can people listening help? Well, they can pay attention to their own brain health. They can promote brain health. And if they know someone who's struggling, bring it to attention, bring it to a medical professional's attention.
And if someone were to very unfortunately die, of course, brain donation has an absolutely critical to our understanding these diseases, not just CTE, but also in disease Parkinson's disease, make a brain donation. It's a legacy that will continue to go forward many years after your death. I shall be donating my brain. But thank you so much.
Thank you so much. Every single time you have opportunity to bring you out, that's why I love Zoe. It helps me to make this notice for you to say it's for my body. And you guys probably know Zoe's sponsor my podcast.
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