SAN FRANCISCO (AP) – An uninvited guest at the NFL’s annual pre-Super Bowl news conference about health and safety, Chris Nowinski stood nearby and listened Thursday as one of the league’s chief advisers about concussions declined to acknowledge a link between football and the brain disease called CTE.
“I wanted to see the talking points in real time, and you can tell it affected me emotionally,” said Nowinski, executive director of the Concussion Legacy Foundation and an outspoken critic of the NFL on the topic of head injuries. “It’s just incredibly frustrating to see this stuff.”
What he found particularly bothersome was an exchange between reporters and Dr. Mitch Berger, a member of the NFL’s head, neck and spine committee.
Berger would not draw a direct line from football to chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a disease linked to repeated brain trauma and associated with symptoms such as memory loss, depression and progressive dementia. Just this week, it was announced that CTE was found in the brain of former Raider quarterback Ken Stabler, one of dozens of deceased players whose brains have shown signs of it.
Berger, chair of the department of neurological surgery at the University of California-San Francisco, repeatedly said that while the types of degenerative changes to the brain associated with CTE have been found in late football players, such signs have also been found “in all spectrums of life.”