Mixed Messages on NFL Brain Injuries

[3Rivers]

NFL's disability board concluded playing football caused brain injuries, even as officials issued denials for years - ESPN

The NFL's retirement board awarded disability payments to at least three former players after concluding that football caused their crippling brain injuries -- even as the league's top medical experts for years consistently denied any link between the sport and long-term brain damage.

The board paid at least $2 million in disability benefits to the players in the late 1990s and 2000s, documents obtained in a joint investigation by ESPN's "Outside the Lines" and PBS' "Frontline" show. The approvals were outlined in previously unpublished documents and medical records related to the 1999 disability claim of Hall of Fame center Mike Webster.

The board's conclusion that Webster and other players suffered brain damage from playing in the NFL could be critical evidence in an expanding lawsuit against the league filed in the U.S. District Court in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania. The lawsuit, which involves nearly 4,000 former players, alleges that the NFL for years denied the risks of long-term brain damage and "propagated its own industry-funded and falsified research to support its position."

Bob Fitzsimmons, a Wheeling, W.Va., lawyer who represented Webster in his disability case and is co-director of the Brain Injury Research Institute, described the retirement board's conclusions as "the proverbial smoking gun."

"It's pretty devastating evidence," said Fitzsimmons, who is not part of the lawsuit against the NFL. "If the NFL takes the position that they didn't know or weren't armed with evidence that concussions can cause total disability -- permanent disability, permanent brain injury -- in 1999, that evidence trumps anything they say."

The NFL declined to comment for this story, but league spokesman Greg Aiello emphasized in an email that the retirement board is independent, and that its decisions "are not made by the NFL or by the NFL Players Association."

The NFL, which has filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit, in recent years has denied that it concealed information about the risks of chronic brain injury and says it has updated its policies as concussion research has evolved over the past two decades.

Yet in a series of scientific papers from 2003 to 2009, members of the NFL's Mild Traumatic Brain Injury Committee wrote that "no NFL player" had experienced chronic brain damage from repeated concussions. The committee, first formed in 1994, asserted that NFL players were different than boxers, whose susceptibility to brain injuries caused by the sport has been documented since the 1920s.

"Professional football players do not sustain frequent repetitive blows to the brain on a regular basis," members of the NFL committee wrote in a December 2005 paper in "Neurosurgery," the official journal of the Congress of Neurological Surgeons.

However, board documents obtained by "Outside the Lines" and "Frontline" show that the NFL retirement board determined in 1999 that repeated blows to the head had left Webster, who spent most of his 17-year career with the Pittsburgh Steelers, "totally and permanently" disabled. The board based its finding on the diagnoses of five doctors, including a Cleveland neurologist hired by the board to examine the player. The doctors described Webster as "childlike" and showing signs of dementia.

With all these findings on brain trauma what will football look like in 10-20 years?

 

[bsmooth]

Calling it the sport's biggest challenge, Goodell said his goal is to change the sport's culture — a culture in which players and coaches are discouraged from hiding injuries to keep players on the field. The problem is not unique to football, he said, noting that athletes in other sports are hesitant to leave when others are still competing or, in the case of the military, in danger.
"The culture of the athlete is still too much of a play-through-it, rather than player safety mentality. Many players have publicly admitted to hiding concussions and other head injuries," he said, telling the story of a family friend with a 15-year-old daughter who hid a concussion because she didn't want to come out of a field hockey game.

Goodell as usual shifts the blame on the players while trying to act like he didn't, go infront of Congress just a few years ago completely denying a link between head injuries and brain diseases in players, try making 20 game seasons or bring in incompetent officials compromising player safety.

Need to go back to leather helmets.