Concussions Caused By Football Players

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Do you know why football players often miss games? One of the biggest reasons why is that they're often dealing with concussions. Concussions are caused from hard hits to the head. These concussions can lead to long term brain trauma. Football is a very dangerous sport. It often leads to brain disease, sometimes death, and even has caused a few former players to commit suicide. Football has been proved to be one of the most dangerous sports in the world. At first, some may have thought that the concerns about football are being overstated; that it's really not as bad as it is made out to be. The author of this article, Bryson Reynolds, performed an experiment with the goal to determine how much more impact to the head football players …show more content…

One player by the name of Dave Duerson committed suicide so studies could be done on his brain. Duerson played a total of eleven years in the NFL as a safety for the Chicago Bears. Throughout his career, his family said he suffered at least 10 concussions and lost consciousness during a few of his concussion. The problem is he never went to the hospital which caused his injuries to progressively get worse. As he was getting older, he was showing many symptoms of CTE, such as poor judgement, memory loss, mood swings, impulse control. Because of all of these injuries, his life was more or less over after football and he would suffer from these terrible things for the rest of his life. On February 17 2011, when he was fifty years old, he decided he doesn't want to live life suffering anymore. He shot himself in the chest, almost definetly doing so to preserve his brain for future testing. He also left a note next to him asking for his brain to be given to the NFL Brain Bank, which performs tests on the brains of former players. Following tests, they concluded that Dave Duerson had “classic pathology of CTE and no evidence of any other disease. This quote tells us that Dave Duerson did in fact have CTE. Also, this quote teaches us that CTE is very specific in its form, as it isn't to be mistaken for any other disease. Also, Duerson’s case of CTE was only considered moderately advanced, showing that this wasn't anything too out of the ordinary. The worst part was the conclusion which the NFL Brain Bank came to. They stated that if he hadn't gotten CTE and been suffering from these symptoms as he got older, he almost likely wouldn't of committed suicide and would still be

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