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One-third of former professional football players reported in a new survey that they believe they have the degenerative brain disease known as chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE.
The research, published Monday in the medical journal JAMA Neurology, represents one of the broadest surveys to date of former NFL players' perception of their cognitive health and how widely they report symptoms linked to CTE, which is thought to be caused by concussions and repeated hits to the head.
The findings are based on a Harvard University survey of retired professional football players whose careers spanned from 1960 and 2020. Of the 1,980 respondents, 681 said they believed they had CTE. More than 230 former players said they had experienced suicidal thoughts, and 176 reported a diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease or other form of dementia.
Some symptoms — including depression, signs of cognitive impairment and suicidal thoughts — were more common among the "perceived CTE" group, researchers found. Even after controlling for other predictors of suicidality, the study found that retired players who believed they had CTE were twice as likely to report frequent thoughts of suicide or self-harm.
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