EVERY YEAR, around 1.5 million children and teenagers kick-off their school years as part of youth or high school football team.
Another 75,000 young people will participate in college football. Every one of these young, vibrant Americans will be exposing themselves to the risk of suffering multiple concussions. Every concussion and every impact to the head may lead to some degree of long-term brain damage, the severity of which each of these young people may only realize 10, 20, or 50 years later.
I have a new perspective on the game of football. At 25, I may now be forced to retire from professional wrestling because of brain damage caused by the cumulative effects of multiple concussions over my life. As part of a research project I’ve undertaken to understand what doctors call post-concussion syndrome, I have learned that my problem started in football, and that the following information needs to be shared with everyone.
Most concerned parents are comforted by the belief that a helmet will protect their child’s brain. This is a mistake. The design of football helmets and face masks has evolved to remove the incentive not to use the head as a battering ram. Only now are we learning the consequences. In the last year two major studies, one by the NFL and one at Virginia Tech, have revealed the true severity of football impacts.
They found that a struck player’s head may experience forces more than 130 times the force of gravity. The average player may take 50 shots to the head averaging 40 times the force of gravity in every game, and over the course of an entire season, the number of impacts reaches a few thousand.
The head can experience a change in velocity of 20 miles per hour in an instant, which leads to forces similar to severe automobile accidents. Many concussion-producing hits have enough force to have cracked the skull had there been no helmet. Because athletes have continued to get bigger, stronger and faster, and because more impacts now involve the “protected” head, there is little reason to believe football players at every level are not suffering more concussions than ever before.
A study published in the Journal of Child Neurology in 2001 found that around half of all football players at the high school level suffer at least one concussion a season, with an average of more than three. Two other studies published in the Clinical Journal of Sports Medicine in 2000 and 2002 confirm similar incidence rates at the college and professional levels.
The need to understand the consequences of these repetitive head injuries has never been more critical.
Medical science is only beginning to understand links between multiple concussions and increased risk for afflictions like Alzheimer’s disease, depression, memory loss, cognitive impairment and dementia. As well, there is evidence from studies on boxers proving that repeated head impacts can, over time, lead to brain damage despite those impacts never having caused a single concussion.
Although there have been few attempts to quantify the risk, the initial research is alarming. One large study of former football players by the Center for the Study of Retired Athletes found that 20 percent of those with more than only three lifetime concussions suffered from depression, and 17 percent reported memory problems that for many of them may be an early indication of Alzheimer’s disease.
As the concussion problem continues to grow, we need to prepare for a future with hundreds of thousands of young men who have 10 or 20 lifetime concussions from football. Parents should consider that younger players are more prone to getting concussions and more severe brain damage from concussions than older players.
The damage caused by concussions in children theoretically impairs the child’s ability to reach their full cognitive potential, inhibiting their ability to learn and classroom performance, and can cause personality changes, behavioral, emotional, and attention deficit disorders, and may accelerate the natural process of brain degeneration when they get older.
This fall, thousands of American parents will face a child begging to be allowed to play football. If you truly believe that the game is not for your child, stand firm.
Chris Nowinski was a starting defensive tackle at Harvard University and currently is a World Wrestling Entertainment star.
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