NFL grant will help fund further concussion research, CTSE says

For Boston University’s Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy, it’s not always about the money.

While recent headlines may say differently &- last week, the NFL donated $1 million to the center to help it continue its research into the debilitating mental effects that repeated concussions can have on both professional and youth athletes later in life, resulting in the disease chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) &- CSTE co-director Robert Stern said all the support the NFL has given the center, not just financially, is valuable.

“We were just hoping for their support by encouraging retired and current athletes to participate in our research,” he said. “We were also hoping they would do things like make some changes to their rules and to, very importantly, do some prevention and education for youth athletes. And they did all that stuff.”

The center’s findings have revealed that repeated blows to the head like those football players receive while competing may lead to increased risk of mental illnesses later in life.

“We never anticipated or discussed any financial support with them prior to us reading about it in the newspaper. So that was kind of a surprise,” he said. “To athletes all over the place, it showed [that the NFL] understood that this is a big issue. So giving us money was really icing on the cake.”

The relationship between the CSTE and the NFL hasn’t always been as rosy as it seems now. For years, the NFL continually dismissed the center’s efforts to bring its research on the dangers that athletes faces to the public fore.

A 2008 survey revealed that retired NFL players suffer from dementia, Alzheimer’s and memory-related illnesses at a much higher rate than most American males. However, even as evidence like this piled up against it, the NFL continued to deny any possible link.

That changed this year. This season the NFL implemented rules disallowing athletes who are even suspected of having suffered a concussion from participating in games or practices before being examined by a neurological expert independent of a team’s medical staff., Stern said.

The NFL also began airing public service announcements during game broadcasts aimed at educating young athletes about dealing with concussions.

“If you’re a player, protect yourself and your teammates. If you think you’re hurt, don’t hide it, report it. And take time to recover,” said one such NFL announcement aired last season.

While Stern stressed that education on the dangers of concussions is important, he made sure to reinforce how expensive the CSTE’s research is. The NFL’s donation, he said, will go a long way towards helping advance the center’s work, despite the research’s massive expenses.

“It’s an unrestricted gift, which means that it is to be used to support our overall research program, which means it’s not earmarked for any specific project,” he said. “We have so many needs for financial support in our research program. From our clinical research to our neuropathology, it’s just an endless amount of money that is required to do this kind of research.”

It was also important for the CSTE to accept the donation without compromising its research. Stern said that the center has “spent the last few months making sure that if we were going to receive the financial gift from the NFL, that there would be no strings attached.”

With the NFL’s grant as well as federal funds and funds raised by BU’s School of Medicine, the CSTE is working toward understanding the effects of CTE to the point where it can develop ways of preventing it.

“The only way to truly diagnose CTE is looking at brain tissue after someone passes away,” Stern said. “And so the goal of this very large area of our research now is to be able to detect and diagnose CTE while someone’s alive, so then we can hopefully then be able to figure out how to create good treatments and eventually prevent it.”