- Sacramento :: WE’VE known since 1964 that cigarette smoking is harmful to your
health. We’ve known for more than 40 years that alcohol damages the
developing brain of a child. We’ve known since the mid-70s that asbestos
causes cancer and other serious diseases. Knowing what we know now, we
do not smoke in enclosed public spaces like airplanes; we have passed
laws to keep children from smoking or drinking alcohol; and we do not
use asbestos as an industrial product.
As
we become more intellectually sophisticated and advanced, with greater
and broader access to information and knowledge, we have given up old
practices in the name of safety and progress. That is, except when it
comes to sports.
Over
the past two decades it has become clear that repetitive blows to the
head in high-impact contact sports like football, ice hockey, mixed martial arts
and boxing place athletes at risk of permanent brain damage. There is
even a Hollywood movie, “Concussion,” due out this Christmas Day, that
dramatizes the story of my discoveries in this area of research. Why,
then, do we continue to intentionally expose our children to this risk?
If
a child who plays football is subjected to advanced radiological and
neurocognitive studies during the season and several months after the
season, there can be evidence of brain damage at the cellular level of
brain functioning, even if there were no documented concussions or
reported symptoms. If that child continues to play over many seasons,
these cellular injuries accumulate to cause irreversible brain damage,
which we know now by the name Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, or
C.T.E., a disease that I first diagnosed in 2002.
Depending
on the severity of the condition, the child now has a risk of
manifesting symptoms of C.T.E. like major depression, memory loss,
suicidal thought and actions, loss of intelligence as well as dementia
later in life. C.T.E. has also been linked to drug and alcohol abuse as
the child enters his 20s, 30s and 40s.
The
risk of permanent impairment is heightened by the fact that the brain,
unlike most other organs, does not have the capacity to cure itself
following all types of injuries. In more than 30 years of looking at
normal brain cells in the microscope, I have yet to see a neuron that
naturally creates a new neuron to regenerate itself.
We
are born with a certain number of neurons. We can only lose them; we
cannot create new neurons to replenish old or dying ones.
In
2011, the two leading and governing professional pediatrics
associations in the United States and Canada, the American Academy of
Pediatrics and the Canadian Pediatric Society, published a position
paper recommending that children should no longer be allowed to engage
in high-impact contact sports, exemplified by boxing, and willfully
damage their developing brains.
Since
then, researchers have independently confirmed that the play of amateur
or professional high-impact contact sports is the greatest risk factor
for the development of C.T.E. Where does society at large stand now,
knowing what we know?
As
physicians, it is our role to educate and inform an adult about the
dangers of, for example, smoking. If that adult decides to smoke, he is
free to do so, and I will be the first to defend that freedom. In the
same way, if an adult chooses to play football, ice hockey, mixed
martial arts or boxing, it is within his rights.
However,
as a society, the question we have to answer is, when we knowingly and
willfully allow a child to play high-impact contact sports, are we
endangering that child?
Our
children are minors who have not reached the age of consent. It is our
moral duty as a society to protect the most vulnerable of us. The human
brain becomes fully developed at about 18 to 25 years old. We should at
least wait for our children to grow up, be provided with the information
and education on the risk of play, and let them make their own
decisions. No adult, not a parent or a coach, should be allowed to make
this potentially life-altering decision for a child.
We
have a legal age for drinking alcohol; for joining the military; for
voting; for smoking; for driving; and for consenting to have sex. We
must have the same when it comes to protecting the organ that defines
who we are as human beings.
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