A new study from Boston University has offered a fresh look at the impact of chronic traumatic encephalopathy, known as CTE, on players from the National Football League. Researchers examined 33 athletes who had been diagnosed with the degenerative brain condition through an autopsy, focusing on the range of symptoms they had experienced during their lives before their deaths.
One of the most significant findings concerned memory. More than 60 percent of the players included in the study had reported memory problems before they died, the highest share of any symptom the researchers tracked. The result points to memory loss as one of the most common difficulties faced by those who were living with the disease.
The study also looked at cognitive abilities beyond memory. More than half of the athletes had struggled with executive function, a term that covers a person's ability to control inhibitions, to plan ahead, and to handle several tasks at once. Problems in this area can affect everyday decision making and the routines of daily life.
Other cognitive areas were affected as well. About 40 percent of the players had experienced difficulties with language, while roughly a quarter of those studied had dealt with problems related to attention. Together, the figures illustrate how broadly the condition can reach into different aspects of a person's thinking.
To document these symptoms, the players and their families had filled out an assessment designed to identify them. Because CTE cannot be confirmed while a person is still alive, this kind of detailed reporting from relatives is an important way for researchers to reconstruct how the disease had presented before an athlete died.
That limitation remains central to how the condition is understood, since CTE can only be diagnosed after death. In the group that was examined, the researchers found that the average age of death for the players who had the disease was 65, offering one measure of how the illness has coincided with the lives of those it affects.
The latest findings arrived just days after a separate study estimated that as many as one in four players may have CTE. Taken together, the two pieces of research add to a growing body of work examining how common the disease may be among football players and how deeply it can affect them.