Football was a BIG part of my youth, and high school days. Some of my favorite memories are on the football field....but I'm torn on letting my son play. I feel as if I'm going to make a big mistake either way if I let him play or don't let him play. Not letting him play, at least I won't have as bad of regret than if I do let him play and it has a lasting effect on his brain.
http://bringmethenews.com/2015/12/0...-link-between-youth-sports-and-brain-disease/
Do you have brain damage from your playing days? I played, had 2 concussions, and have no ill effects. I work in scientific research. I use my brain everyday regardless of what my posting history on gopherhole suggests.
The story is not written on this research. It's just not. Alot of the alarm that's being portrayed as a crisis is media driven.
It may end up being as damaging as some think it is, but likely through careful research there will not only be better tools for understanding how the brain is injured from concussions, but also how to recover from them, and how to repair that damage later on if necessary.
It's not an all or nothing issue as most things are not in this world.
Football is in my opinion the greatest team game ever conceived. It teaches so many important life lessons other sports just cannot replicate.
Ultimately this is a free country and whatever decision you make is your to make, but I'd be careful counting upon alot of the headlines you see as unbiased fact.
Even this most recent finding from the Mayo discussed the need for further research into genetic markers that seem to correlate with the CTE damage they were specifically looking for.
In addition most samples(45 of the 66) of athletes came back negative for CTE.
Here's a good diagram describing the research, and a link to the paper.
http://rd.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00401-015-1502-4/fulltext.html
A few notes not necessarily discounting this research, but more illustrating the difficulty in quickly researching this issue.
The brain bank is one of neurological diseases, with a small number of control brains. Makes sense since they do research on brain diseases, but it does bias the overall population as being intrinsically "brain diseased". They mention at the end of this paper that it is imperative to screen other brain banks for controls.
I also find some issue with the fact that 65 of the 66 brains were caucasian, this is not a great representation of the overall population, it's what they have on hand, they need more brains!
It's also somewhat disingenuous of the headlines to characterize this as amateur athlete brains since these are mostly old men who donated their brains after the onset of a neurological disease in their old age. I would also wonder what the concussion protocols most recently adopted are doing to the athletes. In a 78 year old man he would have played in the 50's or 60's, when a concussion protocol was to have a cigarette and a cup of coffee on the sidelines and get back out there.
I really look forward to the research becoming complete on this issue, I almost see it as a space race into the brain that could unlock all sorts of potential discoveries not the least of which could be cures for some awful diseases. In the mean time let the kid play peewee if he wants to and make a decision on his future when he hits high school and possibly when the research is more complete.
