Football and Brain Injuries

Football and Brain Injuries: Merely Contingent or Causal?

Recently in the news, there has been a lot of discussion about brain injuries and football. The two seem likely to go hand in hand. Football is an incredibly ‘full contact’ sport. It isn’t surprising that knocking your head around day after day could lead to some serious brain damage.

Despite the intuitive nature of the relationship between brain injuries and football accidents, alarming statistics are emerging about serious neurological disorders emerging in veteran football players in the NFL. These alarming contingencies of head injuries and having played football in the NFL have begun to stir up causal claims. The question facing both researchers and NFL representatives is whether or not head injuries sustained in the NFL cause brain diseases later in life.

Observing Contingency
The observation of the link between the numerous concussions and head injuries sustained during an NFL career and early onset neurological disorders is out there and is hard to ignore. The two are seen to be fairly contingent (i.e. co-occurring). How substantial is this relationship? Is it substantial enough for stronger claims?

These are the concerns of researchers and representatives of the House Judiciary Committee. These are also concerns of leaders of the NFL. NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell has said on more the one occasion that they are concerned about this and will fully cooperate with researchers.

Causal Claims about Brain Disease
This cooperation will be extremely important to researchers collecting medical data from records. The leap from observing the co-occurrence of football related head injuries with brain disease to making causal claims about these head injuries causing brain disease is not an easy one to make. The current goal for researchers is to collect enough data to show a direct link between the two.

Scientific research is important for understanding but what is equally important is determining what to do with that understanding. If a causal link is established, what will this mean for the future of one of America’s favorite pastimes?

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