Brandi Chastain, a member of the 1999 U.S. Women’s Soccer Team, is donating her brain to science. Concerned with all the news in recent years about the affects of brain injuries later in life, Chastain wants her brain studied, in hopes someone might benefit from what researchers learn.
According to a report from Fox Sports, Brandi Chastain announced on Thursday she is donating her brain to the VA-BU-CLF Brain Bank, a joint project with the Department of Veterans Affairs and Boston University School of Medicine, upon her death.
“It is really about: How I can help impact soccer beyond scoring a goal in 1999 in the World Cup final. Can I do something more to leave soccer in a better place than it was when I began this wonderful journey with this game?” she said.
Researchers at the BU School of Medicine are studying the “postmortem human brain and spinal cord tissue in hopes of diagnosing and treating chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, a degenerative condition caused by a blow or blows to the head.”
While many suffering from CTE are former football players, soccer players sustain some serious blows, too. Although Brandi Chastain isn’t positive if she has sustained concussions, she suspects she has.
Brandi Chastain played for the U.S. national team from 1988-2004. She was on the team that won the inaugural Women’s World Cup in 1991, as well as its second in 1999.
Kudos to Brandi Chastain for having the foresight to make this kind of post-mortem donation. Hopefully researchers will look much about CTE, that will allow further protection of athletes in the future.
In 1985 Jim McMahon was the quarterback for one of the most popular Super Bowl championship teams in NFL history. The rebel-type QB with the spiked hair and dark shades relished the hype and basked in the spotlight.
But that was 29 years ago.
More recently, McMahon would leave his house and not remember how to get back home. He would need to call his girlfriend Laurie and say, “I don’t know where I’m at. I don’t know how I got on this road. Aliens abducted me and put me over here.”
He would also lie in the dark for weeks suffering from painful headaches. And in his most oppressive hours, he would even consider ending all the suffering by taking his own life.
McMahon spoke candidly yesterday in a news conference about what his life is like today, after years of playing football, after taking repeated hits to the head. ”I am glad I don’t have any weapons in my house or else I am pretty sure I wouldn’t be here. It got to be that bad.” He added, “I can see how some of these guys have ended their lives, because of the pain.”
The former champion is currently in Chicago because he is being honored today by the Sports Legacy Institute, a group that has been studying what happens to the brain after trauma.
Here’s the truth about concussions. They can lead to early onset dementia, severe depression, and suicidal thoughts. But McMahon is an example that there is some hope. He says that his suicidal thoughts have passed largely in part due to a treatment that drains spinal fluid from the brain. However, he will most likely have to deal with the dementia for the rest of his life.
McMahon is currently fighting back. He and several other former NFL players have filed a federal lawsuit accusing teams of handing out harmful pain medications to make sure players could get back on the field, with absolutely no concern for their long-term health.
Additionally, McMahon is part of larger class-action suit against the NFL for knowingly putting guys back on the field who had concussions, even though the effects of those injuries were life threatening, “The NFL continues to make billions and billions of dollars every year. And some of these guys are homeless. They don’t know who they are, and they were the ones who built this brand to where it’s at.”
Several former NFL players, including McMahon, are challenging the $765 million concussion settlement between the thousands of ex-players and the league. They feel that the funds won’t cover the 20,000 who need it, and the money will fall short of providing for players with the most serious cases of head trauma.
McMahon estimates that he had three to five diagnosed concussions and many more concussions that were not officially diagnosed throughout his football career. The former quarterback also admitted that due to injuries like broken ribs and a broken neck that he developed an addiction to painkillers.
The fate of NFL athletes and a possible connection between repeated brain injury and later health problems is now being taken seriously by the NFL. As part of their new focus, the league last year donated $30 million to the Foundation for the National Institutes of Health (NIH), primarily for research concerning brain trauma.
Today the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has announced eight new studies that will receive funding to study the effects of repeated head injuries, concussions, and traumatic brain injury. The studies were selected by the NIH to receive funding following what it calls a “rigorous scientific review process.
Two of the eight studies will receive $6 million each to examine long-term brain changes following a head injury or repeated concussions. One of the se two studies will take place at the Boston University School of Medicine and will examine brains for chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) and could help determine a method for diagnosing the condition in the living. The other study will take place at Mount Sinai Hospital and will compare the chronic effects of traumatic brain injuries to features of CTE.
“Although the two cooperative agreements focus on different aspects of TBI, their combined results promise to answer critical questions about the chronic effects of single versus repetitive injuries on the brain, how repetitive TBI might lead to CTE, how commonly these changes occur in an adult population, and how CTE relates to neurodegenerative disorders like Alzheimer’s disease,” said Dr. Story Landis, director of the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke.
The six other studies will be smaller projects, with the NIH spending slightly more than $2 million for them. These studies will be pilot projects related to collecting data on sports-related concussions, particularly in children and adolescents. Any of the projects could become larger studies if results seem promising to the NIH.
“We need to be able to predict which patterns of injury are rapidly reversible and which are not,” said Landis. “This program will help researchers get closer to answering some of the important questions about concussion for our youth who play sports and their parents.”
The National Hockey League has come a long way in the last 8 years. From a lockout that was the first in professional American sports to cost a league an entire season, to the overwhelming popularity of the Winter Classic. These go to show how far the league has changed and how far hockey itself has come in the last 10 years. One of the benefactors of this huge growth is David Singer, the purveyor of Hockeyfights.com. In a WebProNews exclusive we were able to ask him a few questions about fighting in hockey, his website, and the state of the game in general.
We asked David when his love of hockey fights began, and how the idea for the site came about.
“In one of the first few games I went to as a kid there was a fight. It’s impossible not to notice the energy it brought to the arena. It was just like a goal. I didn’t appreciate fighting until I was a little older and understood the role it could play in a game (something that’s been forever debated). I wanted to track fights the way others track goals and other statistics. Penalty minutes were always being kept, but I wanted to know how many times someone was fighting, and who they were fighting. I started keeping some numbers and talking about local teams. It snowballed from there.”
Moving on to the popularity of his site the question of his daily visitor numbers growing exponentially in post-lockout hockey came up. “It took a couple of years post-lockout for the site to have bigger growth,” said Singer. “The first, and most obvious reason, is there weren’t as many fights in the seasons after the lockout. A close second was just re-gaining the hockey community in general. Many, especially the diehard fans that visit hockeyfights.com, were turned off by the league shutting down for a season. While the league has rebounded, some have never come back.”
This brought me to wondering if his site sees a bigger uptick in views when 2 heavyweights go at it, or when there is an incident like last year’s Islanders v Penguins brawl, or maybe when a star drops em like Crosby or Ovetchkin? “The site is definitely event-driven. A brawl can trigger traffic.” He went on to say, “Some stars can, but it’s not as predictable as one might think. Sometimes a player from a European country that usually doesn’t fight drops the gloves and I’ve got a huge influx of traffic from his home country and ex-pats everywhere. Just as much as a fight, big news can do the same. There is the hockey in hockeyfights.com and big trades or signings or any other big news can drive visits.”
One of the more publicized things this year has been head shots and how the NHL is dealing with them. Many players have gotten suspensions. I wondered what is the one thing that could get rid of them? Smaller pads? The repeal of the instigator? David had a thoughtful answer about this touchy subject.
“Repealing the instigator would help in my opinion, but it would take time and lenient coaching. I’m not sure most teams have that sort of patience anymore. Either way, I don’t expect it to happen, even though I’d like to see it. Ironically, I think it’d curb fighting in the long-run. As for head shots in general, especially those that cause injury, I think there are a few things that can be done to help. Equipment should be an easy fix. Too many use it as weapons, or consider it armor. With technology today, there has to be a way to protect players without allowing that protection to hurt others. However, I don’t think that’s the main cause. A lot of it is players looking for a huge, video game-style hit. They’ve been taught to do that from the earliest of lessons. ‘Finish your checks.’ I can’t think of a coach that hasn’t said that. Sometimes, you don’t need to wipe a guy out to do that, but in a day of sprint shifts and the fourth line always wondering if they’ll be scratched or sent to the minors, they’re rarely going to let up on someone. I think it’s something that needs to be adjusted at the lowest levels and the higher leagues need to make sure they keep with that approach. Adding to that are players that put themselves in bad positions looking to draw a penalty, something else they’ve been taught. It’s a bad combination.”
For years all we see is talking heads on ESPN saying that fighting in Hockey is ruining the game and that if it ever wants to go mainstream they need to get rid of it. That got me wondering about who really wants to get rid of fighting in hockey? Is it just non-fans and journalists? Could we really see a day when there is no fighting in hockey? He said, “You’ve hit it: non-fans and some of the media are the largest supporters of trying to take fighting out of hockey, or adjust the penalties for it. Poll after poll shows the players, ‘hockey people’ (non-media, in the business) and most of all, the fans, like it in the game the way it is. I don’t think trying to remove it would benefit the game, and I don’t think it’ll draw in more fans, either. I don’t know if you’ll ever see a day with no fighting whatsoever. No matter what the rules are fights happen in all leagues and all sports, just at varying levels.”
Fights are good for hockey, whether people admit it or not, when stuff like this happens on the opening faceoff, not one single fan leaves that arena while play is going on for any reason, even if it is a blowout:
With over 45,000 likes on Facebook, he gets a lot of attention that was recently brought to the forefront by his posts on Facebook saying Goodbye, (Enter Team) when someone was eliminated from the playoffs. When he posted this, it gave him a barometer of fan hate towards a team. His assumption, by looking at the data, is what you would expect. That the teams with the longer record of being good have the most vocal fans and the most detractors means those posts get the most like and comments.
Every year Hockeyfights.com posts a little award type show with several categories for things like Best feud and best old school moment. Well the main category as one can expect is the fight of the year. This year’s list is pretty good:
The voting process is very simple. Just go to Hockeyfights.com and join. You can then vote on any fight, how good it was, how rested the players are, and you will never be the same. I know I have gotten caught in this website for hours at a time.