NFL great Junior Seau had brain disease CTE when he committed suicide | Fox News

It's no longer simply a football problem or a boxing problem, this is rapidly becoming a national public health problem that we simply have to get a grip on.

The news surrounding the suicide of former major leaguer Ryan Freel indicates that he may have suffered from depression brought on by concussions he incurred (and may have ignored or downplayed due to the "warrior mentality") while playing baseball. The details from the article below are disturbing on many levels.

If you think about the recent questions arising from the rising suicide rates among active military personnel and read some of the signs and symptoms of CTE (below , a possible link could be made between head trauma, CTE and the rise in suicides among soldiers as well. Why the recent uptick? It would seem as if warfare has always been noisy and concussive, but what are we doing recently that is leaving soldiers less protected and more at risk than in the past?

Here is where the National Institute of Health and other public health agencies need to step up their efforts and figure out what needs to be done to address these problems.


From foxnews.com:
NFL great Junior Seau had brain disease CTE when he committed suicide | Fox News:

 ""You can't deny it exists, and it is hard to deny there is a link between head trauma and CTE. There's such strong evidence correlating head trauma and collisions and CTE."

Tyler Seau played American football through high school and for two years in college. He says he has no symptoms of any brain trauma.

Gina Seau's son, Jake, in high school, played for two seasons, but has switched to lacrosse. Her 12-year-old son, Hunter, has shown no interest in playing American football.

"That's fine with me," she said."

Junior Seau, one of the NFL's best and fiercest players for nearly two decades, had a degenerative brain disease when he committed suicide last May, the National Institutes of Health told The Associated Press on Thursday.

Results of an NIH study of Seau's brain revealed abnormalities consistent with chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE).

The NIH, based in Bethesda, Maryland, conducted a study of three unidentified brains, one of which was Seau's. It said the findings on Seau were similar to autopsies of people "with exposure to repetitive head injuries."

Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/sports/2013/01/10/ap-newsbreak-junior-seau-had-brain-disease-cte-when-committed-suicide/?test=latestnews#ixzz2HaKFuPqz

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From SBnation.com
http://mlb.sbnation.com/2013/1/3/3829070/ryan-freel-suicide-mlb-concussions

Last weekend, ex-major leaguer Ryan Freel committed suicide. Since, it's been reported that Freel suffered a number of concussions in his life, with perhaps 10 coming during his baseball career. Monday, the Times reported that Freel's parents have asked that Freel's brain be tested for chronic traumatic encephalopathy(C.T.E.) ...

Testing of brain samples drawn from deceased former players by the Boston University Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy has found that 33 from the N.F.L., along with 17 who competed at other levels, suffered from C.T.E.

With Freel, the center enters the realm of baseball, a sport not usually associated with head trauma. His parents approved the donation of tissue to search for evidence of C.T.E., which might partly explain his decline as a consequence of the injuries.

"I’m very hopeful," [Free's mother] Christie Moore Freel said. "We certainly believe there is some sort of connection."

--snip--

Freel’s former wife said she found no fault with his teams or their medical staffs, concluding that they diagnosed his condition properly and insisted that he abide by the stipulated recovery period.

"He used to get angry at them, wanting to come back sooner than what they recommended," she said.

A collision with a Cincinnati Reds teammate resulted in 30 missed games because of a concussion that was accompanied by memory loss.

From wikipedia.com:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronic_traumatic_encephalopathy

Chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) is a progressive degenerative disease, usually diagnosed post-mortem in individuals with a history of multiple concussions and other forms of head injury. A variant of the condition, dementia pugilistica (DP), is primarily associated with boxing. CTE has been most commonly found in professional athletes participating in American football, ice hockey, professional wrestling and other contact sports who have experienced head trauma. It has also been found in soldiers exposed to a blast or a concussive injury,^[1] in both cases resulting in characteristic degeneration of brain tissue and the accumulation of tau protein. Individuals with CTE may show symptoms of dementia, such as memory loss, aggression, confusion anddepression, which may appear within months of the trauma or many decades later.

Repeated concussions and injuries less serious than concussions ("sub-concussions") incurred during the play of contact sports over a long period can result in CTE. The brain changes in CTE and DP are similar and are delayed effects of repeated concussions and sub-concussions of the brain. In the case of blast injury, a single exposure to a blast and the subsequent violent movement of the head in the blast wind can cause the condition.^[1]

Epidemiology

CTE is a neurological degenerative disease found in individuals who have been subjected to repetitive traumatic head injuries^[2] by way of the acceleration and deceleration of the head on impact and the subsequent damage to axons. Other risk factors are possible but have not yet been reported, due to the biased donated brain bank at the Boston University School of Medicine and elsewhere, which consists mostly of the brains of athletes with a history of professional participation in contact sports.^[3] Professional level athletes are the largest demographic to suffer from CTE due to frequent concussions from play in contact-sport. These contact-sports include American football, ice hockey, rugby, boxing, and wrestling.^[4] Other individuals that have been diagnosed with CTE were involved in military service, had a previous history of chronic seizures and or were involved in activities resulting in head-banging.^[5] Reports of CTE have steadily increased in younger athletes, most likely due to athletes becoming bigger and stronger producing greater magnitudes of force in collision.^[4]

[edit]Pathology

The primary physical manifestations of CTE include a reduction in brain weight, associated with atrophy of the frontal and temporal cortices and medial temporal lobe. The lateral ventricles and the third ventricles are often enlarged, with rare instances of dilation of the fourth ventricle.^[6] Other physical manifestations of CTE include pallor of the substantia nigra and locus ceruleus, atrophy of the olfactory bulbs, thalamus, mammillary bodies, brainstem and cerebellum. As CTE progresses, there may be marked atrophy of the hippocampus, entorhinal cortex, and amygdala.^[2]

On a microscopic scale the pathology includes neuronal loss, tau deposition,TAR DNA-binding Protein 43 (TDP 43)^[7] beta-amyloid deposition, white matter changes, and other abnormalities. The tau deposition occurs as dense neurofibrillary tangles (NFT), neurites, and glial tangles, which are made up of astrocytes and other glial cells ^[6] Beta-amyloid deposition is an inconstant feature of CTE.

A small group of individuals with CTE have chronic traumatic encephalomyopathy (CTEM), characterized by motor neuron disease symptoms and mimics Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) orLou Gehrig’s disease. Progressive muscle weakness and balance and gait problems seem to be early signs of CTEM.^[6]