Periodic Encephalopathy (CTE)

September 28, 2002. No this isn’t the day that Title IX came into play, or the day that Roger Bannister ran a four-minute mile, or the day that LeBron James decided he would leave the Cleveland Cavaliers to play for the Miami Heat. This is the day that we would see an NFL legend, Mike Webster, laying on an autopsy table at the Allegheny County coroner’s office in Pittsburg, Pennsylvania. The significance of this day? After this day, the world of football would be turned upside down. Webster died of heart failure, but there was more to it than what met the eye. Webster was the first confirmed case of Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE). CTE is defined by the Brain Injury Research Institute as, “a degenerative brain disease most commonly found in those who have suffered multiple concussions or mild traumatic brain injuries (Omalu What is CTE?).” In this essay, I will explore CTE and what the NFL has-or rather has not-done to help its players in order to determine if football does cause CTE. Under the microscope, you can see CTE as a “buildup of tau, a
But the effect and extent of the damage has not always been known. Traumatic brain injuries can date all the way back to the 1920’s when they were first discovered in professional boxers. Back then, it was called dementia pugilistica, or punch drunk syndrome (Omalu “Brain Injury Research”). However, CTE as we know it today, mostly in football players, was discovered in 2002 by Doctor Bennett Omalu in the brain of Mike Webster. Mike Webster went to college at the University of Wisconsin-Madison before becoming a stand out NFL player for the Pittsburg Steelers for 17 seasons, that’s 245 regular season games (Fainaru-Wada, 47). In those seasons he wont four Super Bowls and once played six consecutive seasons without missing a single offensive snap. However, his struggles after he retired came to define him more. Mike’s story is just one of