How many readers here believe that either the NFL or the DoD will take responsibility for the millions of men and women permanently scarred by this (and others) condition? Please, raise your hands. Higher. Hmm… Something’s wrong. I don’t see anyone’s hand raised. I wonder why.
http://original.antiwar.com/vlahos/2013/01/21/football-war-brain-damage/
Football, War, & Brain DamageK. Vlahos on how soldiers and athletes have more than bloodlust in common
Flyover at Tampa Buccaneers Bay game during 2012 season. Credit: Cliff McBride/Tampa Bay Tribune StaffMost of us watching the Navy F-18s flyover the Super Bowl or the myriad NFL tributes to the military branches and their “wounded warriors” at nearly every game probably don’t think of it as a twisted glorification of two institutions that have largely contributed to the brain damage of a nation.
Of course not. Most of us are conditioned to accept that football and the military are synonymous expressions of American identity and therefore befitting of fervent manifestations of patriotism, celebrated together under domes that might as well be cathedrals, but identified by such names as “Fed-Ex Field,” or “Bank of America Stadium.” Whoever came up with the idea of conflating the red-blooded American — not to mention highly commercial — sport with military service and war is a marketing genius. And the NFL has certainly run with it straight down middle – guilelessly announcing its “Salute to Service” campaign in November, all the while scooping up millions from defense industry advertisers who see dollar signs among the sanctimonious pageantry and spectacle.
“It is interesting to note how both the military at its upper reaches and the NFL are out to sell a product and have developed a certain symbiosis that fuses national greatness with commercialism,” notes Antiwar writer Phil Giraldi, a longtime fan of the game who’s become increasingly repulsed as the military and NFL continue to ratchet up their mutual exploitation of one another for maximum impact.
“The huge (American) flags at football games, the repeated announcers’ expressions of gratitude for the troops ‘keeping us free,’ and the use of football game ads to aid in recruitment for the armed services,” he told me, “all suggest a communality of interest between the government and America’s favorite sport.”
The late Junior Seau and his children in better times. Seau, a former NFL linebacker, killed himself last year. A postmortem diagnoses found he was suffering from a brain disease caused by too many blows to the head.The real perversity of it all – which turns out to be a real sickness – is that it’s becoming clear that both the military and the NFL are knowingly grinding up our young men and throwing them away for the benefit of the powerful, moneymaking machinery at the top. Case in point: the National Institutes for Health (NIH) announced last week that retired linebacker Junior Seau, who committed suicide by shooting himself in the chest last year, was indeed suffering from Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE), an irreversible brain injury caused by multiple blows to the head. Seau was famous for having over 1800 tackles throughout his 20-year career, but ended his life in a mental state that left him angry, prone to mood swings and alienated from his family. If he had chosen to live, the textbook says the CTE would’ve likely led to full-blown dementia and an early death. He was just 43 years old.
He was the third NFL star to have killed himself under similar circumstances in the last two years.
But Seau has the dubious distinction of being the highest-profile football player to be linked to CTE, his diagnosis sending “shivers” through the NFL last week. It’s assumed he knew what was happening to him, shooting himself in the chest so that his family could donate his brain (CTE can only be detected in post-mortem tissue scans). The NFL, one could say, is reeling, now facing no less than 4,000 lawsuits from former players who say the NFL actually hid the risks from players and did nothing to protect them from severe, degenerative brain damage.
According to ABC news, a study at Boston University’s Center for the Study of Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy recently found CTE in 50 brains of deceased football players — 35 had been NFL, six of them from high school athletes. This calls into question, of course, the dangers of the sport not only at the professional level, but all the way down to the “Pee-Wee” leagues, where five concussions were reported in just one game in Massachusetts last fall.
Pittsburgh Steelers’ Tony Polamalu hits player so hard he knocks helmet off. Credit: Peter Diana/Pittsburgh Post/GazetteCTE is not only associated with football, in fact, it was first described in 1928 after scientists attempted to put a clinical name to what was then called “punch drunk” – the phrase used to characterize the state of mind boxers were left in after too many punches to the bean in the ring. One cannot think of boxing and head injury without conjuring the image of Muhammad Ali, who was diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease in 1984, a condition that has left him neurologically impaired and is associated with his long career in boxing. At this point, Ali has been publically afflicted longer than he was considered the world’s greatest boxer (between 1964 and 1984).
Ali and Seau are now morphing into symbols of how these lucrative contact sports squeeze their athletes until there is nothing left, and then they are left behind, shadows of their younger, more complete and virile selves. If they are lucky, like Ali, they live out the rest of their lives infirm, but in luxury, and with good doctors. Others don’t do so well. Plus, with CTE, the disease comes on slowly and manifests itself in ways that can isolate the victim from his normal support system, starting with depression and bouts of uncontrolled anger. Victims are seen as having behavioral issues, rather than a physiological illness, until of course, it is too late.
For years, the families of former Atlanta Falcons star Ray Easterling, 62, who killed himself in April last year, and former Chicago Bear Dave Duerson, 50, who committed suicide in 2011, said the men struggled with mental health issues until they couldn’t take it anymore. For his part, Easterling had slid into dementia over a 20-year period, his wife reported. Both men’s brains have since been tested and showed evidence of advanced CTE.
The families of both Easterling and Duerson are suing the NFL for negligence.
Which brings us back to the military’s cozy relationships with the NFL. It seems like they now have more than just bloodlust and brawn in common. In fact, there is a growing body of evidence that suggests that veterans who had sustained multiple concussive incidents in the war – no matter how “mild” — are at risk of CTE, too.
This is Your Brain on War
The post-9/11 expansion of the attack on al Qaeda and the Taliban into a full-blown occupation and nation-building exercise in Afghanistan, plus the seven-year war of choice in Iraq over weapons of mass destruction that did not exist, put more than 2.3 million American men and women into harm’s way in the so-called Global War on Terror.
Staff Sgt. Cory Remsburg undergoing therapy for a brain injury he receivedfrom an IED blast in Afghanistan in 2009.Credit: USA Today/H. Darr Beiser.
For years we have known that the so-called “signature wound” of this war has been traumatic brain injury (TBI), due to the proliferation of improvised explosive devices (IEDs) in the field. In fact, according to this report by the National Center for PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder), head injuries and injuries due to explosions were more prevalent among the wounded than in the Vietnam War and World War II.
In fact, the Pentagon admitted in 2009 that an estimated 360,000 Iraq and Afghanistan vets could be suffering from some sort of combat-related brain injury. How many Junior Seaus, Ray Easterlings and Dave Duersons are in that pool of thousands we do not know, but research is beginning to indicate that it may be a lot more than Americans are equipped to deal with.
According to a recent study published in the scientific journal Brain (.pdf), CTE can manifest itself in the brains of veterans who suffer what was heretofore considered only “mild” traumatic brain injury in combat. More specifically, the study found that “for some athletes and war fighters, there may be severe and devastating long-term consequences of repetitive brain trauma that has traditionally been considered only mild.” This compliments findings last year that suggest that unlike football players and boxers who take repeated blows to the head, a few concussive events like being throttled by an IED blast in an armored vehicle, can have the same effect, and open the door to CTE or other degenerative brain diseases.
From the New York Times in May:
Scientists who have studied a degenerative brain disease in athletes have found the same condition in combat veterans exposed to roadside bombs in Iraq and Afghanistan, concluding that such explosions injure the brain in ways strikingly similar to tackles and punches. …
The researchers also discovered what they believe is the mechanism by which explosions damage brain tissue and trigger the wasting disease, called chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or C.T.E., by studying simulated explosions on mice. The animals developed evidence of the disease just two weeks after exposure to a single simulated blast, researchers found.
Now, let us ponder a few things. One, the chance that a soldier or Marine endured more than one concussive event overseas during his service seems pretty likely considering that over a million have been deployed twice or more to the war zone. According to a NYT report last March, 107,000 active duty Army soldiers had been deployed three or more times since 9/11, and “even seven or eight deployments are not unheard of.”
Sure, the alarms were raised – fleetingly, it seems – and we’ve done our best to write about the pitfalls of multiple deployments for some time. Back in 2007 as President George W. Bush gave the green light for then-Gen. David Petraeus’s vaunted “surge” of troops into Iraq, cooler heads were warning that the forces were already stretched too thin.
“[Petraeus’s] main concern is his strategy,” defense expert Larry Korb told this writer at the time. “He is putting his interest, which is the battlefield, before the long-term interest of the Army and of the country.”
Added Col. Gian Gentile, Iraq vet and West Point professor, “[The tempo] is continuing to wear down the Army to the point of exhaustion.”
But such dire warnings soon died down to a whisper, and then when Barack Obama took office in 2009, there was a little, but no lasting discussion on the health of the forces before he surged some 30,000 more troops into Afghanistan, at which point the IED attacks spiked over the course of the next two years.
Consider, too, how politics and money have always superseded the health of our servicemen and women, beginning with Donald Rumsfeld’s “you go to war with the Army you have, not the one you want” in response to a question about the lack of vehicle armor, to the very fact that the surges and withdrawals have always been timed to the benefit of the man in the White House. How many head injuries were caused before they got proper Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) vehicles, or because contractors out to make a buck were producing substandard helmets (examples here and here)?
Consider the minds we would have saved if we had never entered into these protracted wars of choice in the first place.
Knowing all of this should make watching the Northrop Grumman advertisements extolling the virtues of the war machine during the Super Bowl pretty repulsive. Ditto for the flyovers (which last year cost the taxpayer nearly half a million dollars), the slick recruitment pitches and the gratuitous genuflections to the veterans on the sidelines.
All of it is like placing heaps of cloyingly fragrant flowers around a corpse. At some point the stench of the truth will not be denied: that football, like war, is a killer, and the only ones who benefit are those with the gall and the greed enough to make the rest of us believe it’s our patriotic duty to support it.
Follow Vlahos on Twitter @KelleyBVlahos
KaD says:
This is exactly the kind of thing that pisses me off to no end. The FSA are going to strip clubs on the taxpayers money while military personel come home injured and end up homeless and asking for charity. Ooh this makes me mad as hell.
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22nd January 2013 at 4:15 pm
Novista says:
Good find, clipx, thanks.
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22nd January 2013 at 6:46 pm
llpoh says:
If the US quits fighting foreign wars, the problem with injured military personnel will disappear. However, we absolutely need to take care of those soldiers.
Re the NFL -. I think that the players need to be absolutely informed about the risks. If they play after that, it is up to them. They can then make an informed choice of playing and possibly becoming megarich, or not. Banning the NFL will not happen.
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22nd January 2013 at 6:56 pm
AWD says:
Modern day gladiators get head injuries. Roman gladiators got their heads lopped off. The proletariat gets his bread and circuses either way. We live in a screwed society.
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22nd January 2013 at 7:26 pm
Leobeer says:
Another fine sport :
http://deadwrestlers.net/
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22nd January 2013 at 7:37 pm
LLPOH says:
Wrestlers die young because of rampant steroid use. Steroid use would have a pretty big impact on ex-NFL players dropping dead young, too.
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22nd January 2013 at 7:45 pm
Leobeer says:
Steroids, pain-killers, cocaine………. for the sake of “entertainment”, they don’t call it a sport because it is fake.
The WWE usually has a character that is an “American Hero” that constantly reminds the audience of the greatness of the USA. They have shows to entertain the troops as well. It is all good for ratings but I find it a bit hypocritical.
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22nd January 2013 at 8:22 pm
TPC says:
A number of my friends during highschool used roids to get big for football. Thankfully I was a) naturally big/mean, and b) too poor to afford them, else I would have used them too.
Many of those guys have injuries that will go with them through life. Multitudes of broken bones, head injuries, spine injuries, shoulder injuries and the roids users had liver and kidney problems in high school.
We found one guy passed out in the weight room bathroom in a pool of bright red blood. He barely made it.
Personally I had it easy. My right shoulder got tore up pretty bad, I got pinched nerves pretty often (stingers), broke a couple bones in my right arm, a bad knee, and broke my leg.
Oh, and I got “dazed” (concussed) many times. More than I can count, or even begin to remember.
My sophomore year was when I got these injuries for the most part. By my senior year I had the size that I rarely got hit by people, I was the hit-ter not the hit-ee.
Its a brutal sport, and parents of small kids who let them go out for it are morons. I weighed in at 200 pounds my sophomore year, and 250 pounds my senior year……I was a big guy.
The average weight of our varsity defensive line was 235lbs. The average weight of our JV was 175lbs, and it wasn’t uncommon for us to face other teams fielding kids who weighed half what I did.
Its insanity. You can’t pit men of such a size difference against each other, you are asking to get someone killed.
One poor tryhard weighed in at 110lbs, and was 6’1″. It was understood on the varsity side he was offlimits. We’d tackle him, but it was more of a two hand touch than a tackle. We’d kill him if we went 100%.
Then one practice he went over the middle and stretched out for a pass. Our All-state middle line backer didn’t realize it was him and made a very clean, strong tackle.
Broke a few ribs and put the kid in the hospital, also dislocated his shoulder on impact.
The kid was PROUD to have his bones broken for the team. Honestly I think our MLB was more torn up about it than the kid who got rocked.
TL;DR: Kids get hurt playing football.
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22nd January 2013 at 8:53 pm
llpoh says:
TPC during his football days:
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22nd January 2013 at 9:21 pm
llpoh says:
No wonder he has trouble finding suits that fit. This is him at his job interview:
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22nd January 2013 at 9:24 pm
backwardsevolution says:
Good article. If these guys could see their future, I wonder if they’d still play. Soccer too, when two heads collide going for the ball.
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22nd January 2013 at 11:16 pm
ThePessimisticChemist says:
Hoo boy llpoh, thats a low blow lol
I’d post a picture of myself at that age, but I’m not as brave as Admin.
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22nd January 2013 at 11:07 am
Elby says:
I have a background in this area, as I am a research technician in a lab that studies head trauma. Here are a few things that I have learned:
Much of what is labelled post traumatic stress disorder is likely brain trauma, caused by subtle injuries to the brain from the blast waves from high explosives.
One fellow from Walter Reed decided to try and find historical data on brain injuries in soldiers. He found almost none. What he did note was this: the first appearance of “shell shock” occurred during WWI. This was the first major war where dynamite was used. High explosives cause blast waves and this resulted in soldiers who had little to no apparrent trauma but looked ‘out of it,’ or shell shocked.
The UK had hordes of soldiers coming back with this new fangled shell shock. The neurologists of the time were perplexed by this. Some thought there was physical trauma to the brain that was causing the symptoms, and others thought is was a psychiatric issue. It turns out that if these soldiers, and they were legion, had real trauma then the government would be responsible for their rehabilitation. If it was a psychiatric issue, then they were on their own. Guess which side won in that debate.
Consequently, there was no further study of the brains of soldiers who exhibited these symptoms. Yet soldiers returning from wars had such things as ‘combat fatigue’ and now PTSD. Now, I agree that PTSD is a real thing, but 60% of all PTSD soldiers coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan have been exposed to IED blasts. Quite a high correlation, leading one to speculate that a lot of PTSD is actually symptoms from brain injuries due to blast waves from high explosives.
As far a research goes, things have changed for the better. Most of our lab’s work is funded by the DOD. We get grants from the Army and DARPA. They are very interested in understanding traumatic brain injury. So that is an improvement. The bad news is that due to the mess in DC the funding is now levelling off and perhaps drying up. I have just been informed that I am losing my position in this lab due to the lack of funding. I am now in the interview process to start in a nearby lab studying rehabilitation, so hopefully that will work out for me.
The upshot of all this, is that these brain injuries are subtle. They don’t show up externally (no blood, broken bones or other signs of trauma). They don’t show up on MRI’s either. They don’t even show up in looking at the gross anatomy of the brain during autopsy. They symptoms mimic the symptoms of PTSD. Often the symptoms don’t show up until months or years later. There are a lot of walking wounded out there, who look normal, but can no longer function normally in society.
I have an aquaintance whose son now can no longer leave the house due to severe headaches and sensitivity to light. He was in an accident, but also played soccer competitivly for years during high school. My advice: keep your head safe! And by all means, keep your kids out of sports and activities that put them at risk for even ‘mild’ head trauma.
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22nd January 2013 at 3:19 pm
ecliptix543 says:
Thanks for the comment, Elby. It’s always good to get on-the-ground intel about these sorts of issues. Please stick around here if you can deal with all the abusive old farts that have nothing else to do but stir the shit.
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22nd January 2013 at 3:45 pm