The sad thing is you can’t test for CTE until after you have passed away.
I am sure if you could test for it while you were alive, many current and retired NFL players would be suffering from the disease. The NFL would like to keep this quiet and under the rug, but when healthy young men like Vincent Jackson are taking their own lives, you can’t ignore what football is doing to these men.
Here is the report via ESPN.
Former Chargers and Buccaneers wide receiver Vincent Jackson, who was found dead earlier this year in a Florida hotel room, has been diagnosed with Stage 2 chronic traumatic encephalopathy, the Concussion Legacy Foundation announced Thursday.
Jackson, who spent seven seasons playing for the Chargers and five for the Buccaneers, was found dead in a Brandon, Florida, hotel room in February after his family reported him missing. He had been staying at the hotel for a month. He was 38 years old.
“Vincent Jackson was a brilliant, disciplined, gentle giant whose life began to change in his mid-30s. He became depressed, with progressive memory loss, problem solving difficulties, paranoia, and eventually extreme social isolation,” Dr. Ann McKee, chief of neuropathology for the VA Boston Healthcare System and director of the BU CTE Center and VA-BU-CLF Brain Bank, said in a statement.
“That his brain showed stage 2 CTE should no longer surprise us; these results have become commonplace,” McKee said of Jackson. “What is surprising is that so many football players have died with CTE and so little is being done to make football, at all levels, safer by limiting the number of repetitive subconcussive hits. CTE will not disappear by ignoring it, we need to actively address the risk that football poses to brain health and to support the players who are struggling.”
The NFL is a multi-BILLION business that is becoming bigger by the day. They have to do better protecting their players after they are done with the game.