The media is apparently plugging a flawed study about concussions in football, even though it relies on a severely limited slate of data to draw its conclusions.
CNN published a puff-piece titled “It’s not concussions that cause CTE. It’s repeated hits, a study finds,” and it’s a doozy. The network openly promotes the study, which claims CTE isn’t caused by concussions, but by repeated contact.
Goldstein and his colleagues from Boston University evaluated the brains of four deceased athletes, ages 17 and 18 years old. All four had died within a day to four months of receiving some sort of sport-related head injury and had a history of playing football.
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The four specimens were compared to brains from four other athletes of similar age who had not experienced any recent head trauma before death. The brains in this group had no changes in their pathology.
The same CNN report also claimed that the study, “mimicked the experiences of the human brains in mouse models, by exposing mice to repeated head trauma, like that in football, and single blast head trauma, similar to military combat.”
Still, not everybody is buying the method of research. Health News Review noted the following:
Let’s start with the obvious: Four teenaged brains and some mice can’t support sweeping conclusions about the causes of CTE.
Mice are not people, and observations about a handful of brains are incapable of showing cause and effect.
I’m not a medical expert, but I think Health News Review might be onto something here. How can anybody take a look at four people, and then make a claim about CTE? Don’t get me wrong here. Concussions and head trauma are serious issues. They should be taken very seriously. The NFL should study it and make whatever changes are necessary. That’s simply common sense.
However, I’m not sure we’re achieving anything when the media promotes a study that took a look at a grand total of four people and a handful of mice.
If anything, studies like this one would seem to undercut studies that are actually making advancements on CTE. For example, one recent study where 111 brains of former NFL players were tested for CTE, and the disorder was found in 110 of them. Maybe focus a little more on studies like that one and less on studies with fewer participants than guys on the offensive line.
Food for thought.