As part of my ongoing research I spent a large chunk of the last two weeks listening to lectures as part of a webinar series called The Future of Health Now. There was a day on the brain where Dr. Daniel Amen and another brain specialist were both interviewed. The woman doing the interviews has a mother with dementia. She asked both doctors for their top recommendations for people who wanted to avoid dementia. The doctors both agreed on the single most important recommendation.
Don’t play football. Ever.
They expanded on that with recommendations against hockey, boxing or any other contact sport as well as recommending against biking, scootering, skateboarding and skiing without helmets and anything else that might shake your brain or cause a concussion.
Apparently, those mild head butts, even with helmets on, even those that do not lead to concussions, loss of consciousness, or anything else interesting, do cause damage which becomes measurable by the time a student-athlete hits college.
There also appear to be lesser risks to rugby and hockey but there have not been quality studies on either sport. So there may or may not be something there. As best I could tell they haven’t looked at other high contact sports so not finding a problem doesn’t mean anything either way.
But they have the data on football and it is scary.
It turns out that in a survey of retired football players over the age of 50 (average age was only 61) 35% already had mild cognitive impairment.
In other words, at an average age of only 61, one in three football players had signs of dementia. The national average for that age group per the New York Times is about 2 percent.
In a separate study NFL players got dementia at an early age (under the age of 50) at a rate that is 19 times that of the average population.
The risk for military veterans who survived a traumatic brain injury getting dementia early is only 2 times the average. The math therefore indicates that your risk of dementia is less if you get a brain injury in a war than of you play professional football.
Wow.
Check it for yourself here
http://www.webmd.com/fitness-exercise/news/20110719/dementia-risk-for-retired-football-players
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303661904576452243498496516.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/30/sports/football/30dementia.html?pagewanted=all
FYI, my parents never allowed my brother to play football because even back then they were sure it was unsafe. He resented this decision but since he never weighed more than 160 pounds or got much taller than Tom Cruise and he did manage to graduate from an Ivy League university, I am pretty sure they made the right call.
I am a basketball fan myself and was happy to note that a Google search of “basketball players and dementia” returned only five pages of Pat Summitt’s struggles with the disease. I wish her the best but am also comforted to know that getting dementia is considered unusual enough that its not even mentioned on page 5 of a Google search.
That is my kind of sport.
