Chronic traumatic encephalopathy in football players linked to higher number of head hits

Chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) is a neurogenerative disease diagnosed in individuals with exposure to repetitive head impacts (RHI), including military veterans, victims of physical violence, and contact and collision sports (CCS) athletes, including American football players.

A review in Nature Communications reported repetitive head-impact exposure in American tackle football was linked with chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a model based on helmet accelerometer data found.

Researchers designed a position exposure matrix (PEM), composed of American football helmet sensor data, summarized from literature review by player position and level of play.

Using this PEM, Daniel H. Daneshvar and team estimated measures of lifetime RHI exposure for a separate cohort of 631 football playing brain donors.

The key findings of the study are

• Separate models examine the relationship between CTE pathology and players’ concussion count, athletic positions, years of football, and PEM-derived measures, including estimated cumulative head impacts, linear accelerations, and rotational accelerations.