We're coming off the first weekend of the NFL season, full of the bone-crunching hits and brain-rattling tackles that fans have come to love. But never before have fans been so attuned to the consequences of that violence, with concussions and other brain injuries in particular gathering more attention than ever at the start of this autumn's season. And it's not just at the professional level. Owen Thomas killed himself this spring. He was 21, a defensive lineman and captain for the University of Pennsylvania football team, and he hanged himself in his apartment. Any out-of-nowhere suicide by a seemingly happy person leaves those left behind grappling for an explanation. But when doctors completed their autopsy of Thomas, they found something startling: evidence of incipient chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), the condition caused by repetitive brain trauma that's been showing up in many former NFL players.
Doctors in the Boston University group and outside it cautioned that Thomas’s suicide should not be attributed solely or even primarily to the damage in his brain, given the prevalence of suicide among college students in general. But they said that a 21-year-old’s having developed the disease so early raised the possibility that it played a role in his death, and provided arresting new evidence that the brain damage found in N.F.L. veterans can afflict younger players. [The New York Times]
