Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy — CTE — is a debilitating, degenerative brain disease that’s been linked to the repeated head trauma that comes with playing football.
For now, there’s no way to diagnose CTE while someone is alive. Matt Hasselbeck is trying to change that.
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The former NFL quarterback is working with Boston University in an effort to find a method of discovering CTE in living people. The Associated Press reported on those efforts Wednesday.
Per the report, Hasselbeck recently spent two days with Boston University, volunteering his body and brain to undergo a series of tests to determine the extent to which his playing career and the repeated head trauma that came with it has affected his brain health.
What Hasselbeck underwent in CTE study
Hasselbeck told AP that the tests included a blood sample, an MRI on his brain and a PET (positron emission tomography) scan that injects a radioactive tracer that maps out the brain’s function. Hasselbeck also underwent cognitive testing including counting backward from 100 by sevens and reciting the alphabet backward.
Matt Hasselbeck underwent a series of tests in an effort to find a diagnosis for CTE in living people.
(USA TODAY Sports / REUTERS)
Hasselbeck played 17 NFL seasons from 1999-2015. He played in 220 regular-season and playoff games, including 171 starts, taking 379 sacks and countless hits beyond that along the way.
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Those tallies, of course, don’t count his four-year college career at Boston College and his prep and youth career before that. Those hits count too, even if all of them didn’t directly impact his head.
Hasselbeck says he’s doing testing for non-QBs who take more hits
But even with his lengthy playing career, Hasselbeck realizes that the trauma his brain underwent likely pales in comparison to his counterparts elsewhere on the field. For example, offensive and defensive linemen undergo collisions on every play, some of them significant and others relatively minor.
But CTE is linked to not just significant, concussive hits, but also smaller, cumulative impacts to the head that football players undergo repeatedly without thinking twice about.
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Hasselbeck, who says he’s feeling good at 50 years old and is thriving as a family man and broadcast analyst, told AP he’s participating in the research in hopes of improving outcomes for players who haven’t been as fortunate as him.
“They need guys like me — they need people who are feeling good to step up to the plate and volunteer,” Hasselbeck said. “I played quarterback, so I didn’t take some of the hits that a lot of my teammates took.
“But the guys who were blocking for me, or playing special teams, or trying to get the ball back for me on defense, I wanted to do something. They had my back, so in a way I’d like to have their back.”
CTE’s known impact on NFL players
Per AP, CTE has been diagnosed in more than 100 NFL players — all of them posthumously. The condition can only be diagnosed via a postmortem examination of the brain.
The disease has been linked to depression, aggression, memory loss, declining impulse control and thoughts of suicide, among other cognitive disorders. Junior Seau and Aaron Hernandez are among the former NFL players to be diagnosed with CTE after their deaths.
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With no diagnostic method for living people, there’s no telling how many current and football football players suffer from CTE.
Per AP, the study at Boston University focus on two different groups of people: former NFL and college football players and people who didn’t play football or have a history of repeated head trauma who have been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease.
Michael Alosco, the co-director of clinical research at the Boston University CTE Center, told AP that CTE and Alzheimer’s share similar clinical traits but also have key differences that the study seeks to pinpoint in the effort to advance CTE diagnostics.
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“We’ve applied what we’ve known worked for Alzheimer’s disease, but we’ve learned it does not work for CTE,” Alosco said. “We’ve really got to push discovery efforts and find the marker that’s specific to the protein of CTE versus Alzheimer’s because they’re different.
“How we’re going to get there is through the research we’re doing right now.”
