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.

• Only duration of play and PEM-derived measures are significantly associated with CTE pathology.

• Models incorporating cumulative linear or rotational acceleration have better model fit and are better predictors of CTE pathology than duration of play or cumulative head impacts alone.

• CTE severity, and pathologic burden (all P<0.001) among brain donors who played football an average of 12.5 years. These findings implicate cumulative head impact intensity in CTE pathogenesis.

These results also indicate that CTE risk could be reduced by changing how football is practiced and played, researchers observed. "If we cut both the number of head impacts and the force of those hits in practice and games, we could lower the odds that athletes develop CTE," they concluded.

Reference: Daneshvar, D.H., Nair, E.S., Baucom, Z.H. et al. Leveraging football accelerometer data to quantify associations between repetitive head impacts and chronic traumatic encephalopathy in males. Nat Commun 14, 3470 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-023-39183-0.