07-12-2017, 08:28 PM
To state upfront, concussions and brain damage are a serious issue that need addressing. And if you've had a lot of concussions, like Yarbrough, it's better safe than sorry to retire, unless you value football more than conceivably anything.
But the debate playing out on concussions appears to me -- as someone who isn't personally a scientist or doctor, but who writes about health issues a lot -- to be, oftentimes, a bit exaggerated in the doom and harm from concussions. I may have missed some new studies, but based on my most recent review:
1) The CDC periodically conducts surveys of football players. They don't seem to live less long than their comparators. IIRC the rates of depression aren't that much different than their chosen comparators either. This strikes me as an interesting fact to keep in mind.
2) Apparently the media has started to pick up on the possibility of CTE in soccer players of late. Again, this seems logical -- getting a soccer ball hit into your head at 30-40 mph multiple times a game doesn't seem wonderful for your health. But it sort of opens the question: as far as I know, people haven't exactly been clamoring about soccer players' awful post-playing lifestyle for ages. Again, you don't necessarily want to overly rely on casual observation too much, but at a certain point if the health effects are so deleterious you'd think they'd be reasonably easy to pick up on naive pass-throughs.
3) There's a selection bias issue in the science we see presented. That is, the neurologists and pathologists who are looking into this have started with ex-players in bad shape and noticed CTE. It's not quite the same as observing CTE ex ante and then discovering that this leads to bad results. It's possible all sorts of misfortunes caused the players to fall down on their luck. Or it's possible that there's some sort of combination of factors leads to tragedy. Don't quite know.
(Obviously you can't do a randomized controlled trial because it'd be unethical. Still, we've been able to figure out that certain things are bad for health without the benefit of such a trial. Cigarettes are the classic example. But while it took a lot of rigorous scientific work to nail down conclusively that it was bad, and roughly quantify how bad, it was reasonably obvious and accepted that cigarettes were on some level not-so-great for you. King James I of England banned tobacco from the country way back in the day for reasons that are strikingly reminiscent of contemporary times.)
But the debate playing out on concussions appears to me -- as someone who isn't personally a scientist or doctor, but who writes about health issues a lot -- to be, oftentimes, a bit exaggerated in the doom and harm from concussions. I may have missed some new studies, but based on my most recent review:
1) The CDC periodically conducts surveys of football players. They don't seem to live less long than their comparators. IIRC the rates of depression aren't that much different than their chosen comparators either. This strikes me as an interesting fact to keep in mind.
2) Apparently the media has started to pick up on the possibility of CTE in soccer players of late. Again, this seems logical -- getting a soccer ball hit into your head at 30-40 mph multiple times a game doesn't seem wonderful for your health. But it sort of opens the question: as far as I know, people haven't exactly been clamoring about soccer players' awful post-playing lifestyle for ages. Again, you don't necessarily want to overly rely on casual observation too much, but at a certain point if the health effects are so deleterious you'd think they'd be reasonably easy to pick up on naive pass-throughs.
3) There's a selection bias issue in the science we see presented. That is, the neurologists and pathologists who are looking into this have started with ex-players in bad shape and noticed CTE. It's not quite the same as observing CTE ex ante and then discovering that this leads to bad results. It's possible all sorts of misfortunes caused the players to fall down on their luck. Or it's possible that there's some sort of combination of factors leads to tragedy. Don't quite know.
(Obviously you can't do a randomized controlled trial because it'd be unethical. Still, we've been able to figure out that certain things are bad for health without the benefit of such a trial. Cigarettes are the classic example. But while it took a lot of rigorous scientific work to nail down conclusively that it was bad, and roughly quantify how bad, it was reasonably obvious and accepted that cigarettes were on some level not-so-great for you. King James I of England banned tobacco from the country way back in the day for reasons that are strikingly reminiscent of contemporary times.)