Subconcussive injuries are brain injuries on top of unrecovered brain injuries.
As the mother of a grown son with a traumatic brain injury, I couldn't be more excited about the prospect of finding out how to repair even a small part of the damage that changed his life.
As athletes, we're always trained to play through stuff. And I've played through all types of injuries - ankle sprains, shoulder, whatever - and with the brain it's just different.
When I read Mike Webster's file before I began his autopsy, I knew he was more than a 50-year-old heart attack victim. His file and the television reports of the death of the former Pittsburgh Steelers center described a long, steep fall into bizarre behavior. I suspected he suffered from some sort of brain disorder.
Jerry Ford is so dumb he can't walk and chew gum at the same time.... He's a nice fellow, but he spent too much time playing football without a helmet.
I am concussed," I announced, entirely sure of my self-diagnosis.
It's simple to get a concussion, you know. I don't know how many I've had over my career, you know, but I've definitely had my fair share.
I saw Bobby Green and Lando Vannata, and everybody in the back was like, 'Oh, man, that's a sick fight!' And I'm like, 'Dude, look at his face, that cannot be good for his brain.' I'm just honest.
If you want to lower your risk of Parkinson's disease, caffeine is protective to some extent; nobody knows why. Head injuries are bad for you. They lead to Parkinson's disease.
At one time, the treatment for a certain kind of psychosis had been to push an ice pick up through the orbit of the eye, into the frontal lobe; the ice pick was then stirred around until it reduced the problematic brain tissue to non-functioning porridge.
They were just accidents. Luke said he was just testing my concussion. I'm not mad at him.
Is a concussion going to lead to CTE? No, probably not in most cases. But if you have enough concussions over a certain amount of time, yes, then I think you can lead to CTE.
I think I had four concussions throughout my career that were diagnosed, and I guess that I've had seven more. But the fact that three of them came in a four month span when I was making a comeback in 2004 is a little bit scary.
As long as we're having contact and as long as there are collisions, there's going to be head injuries. What the long-term consequences are of that, we're beginning to learn, and that definitely will have an impact on the game as we know it.
My breadth of football experience, my injury history, and my all-or-nothing goal to become one of the best linebackers in the NFL, combined with all I'd been learning about the game's neurological effects on the brain, convinced me I'd be wise in choosing another career.
Chronic means long term. Traumatic means associated with trauma. Encephalopathy means a bad brain.
I was told I had brain damage. I always knew it was an unfair label. Now I have a clearer understanding of what's wrong and I feel relieved and a bit more relaxed about myself.
When you have a fighter who's been punched a lot and been knocked out a lot of times, they're not going to be able to recover. They're going to look like they were knocked out.
You get a concussion. It could take 30, 40 days until that starts to come to life where you're in agony. Ask any doctor.
As many know, brain injury comes in many forms. The two most prevalent brain injuries - stroke and trauma - affect more than 2.2 million Americans, and these numbers are expected to grow.
On a foggy, steel gray Saturday in September 2002, Bennet Omalu arrived at the Allegheny County coroner's office and got his assignment for the day: Perform an autopsy on the body of Mike Webster, a professional football player.
After my neurosurgery, part of my brain was missing, and I had to deal with that. It wasn't the grey matter, but it was the gooey part dead center that makes key hormones and neurotransmitters.
It's impossible for me to dissociate the risk of playing football from the risk of C.T.E.
As more and more people recognize the level of violence involved and the consequences of CTE [chronic traumatic encephelopathy, a degenerative brain disorder], they're obviously going to say "We don't want this to be a part of culture." And they overlook the fact that there's a huge swath of the populace where physicality is still a real common thing.
Who knew hitting my head and passing out would be so much fun?
