In the new movie Concussion, Will Smith plays a neuropathologist who performed a game-changing autopsy on former Pittsburgh Steelers center Mike Webster in 2002. After a career in which Webster earned four Super Bowl rings and a spot in the Pro Football Hall of Fame, he suffered from memory loss, depression, and dementia, was homeless at times, and died at age 50. (The movie is based on a GQ article that describes Webster’s psychiatric symptoms, including “pissing in his oven and squirting Super Glue on his rotting teeth.”) When the neuropathologist, Bennet Omalu, analyzed Webster’s brain tissue, he discovered clumps of tau proteins, generally associated with neuro­degeneration. In 2005, he published a paper arguing that Webster had suffered from what he recognized as chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, brought on by more than two decades of brain battering on the field.

As Omalu and others studied the brains of dozens of former players who had died, they continued to discover signs of CTE. Not surprisingly, the National Football League fought to discredit the work, possibly hoping to avoid expensive disability payments to ex-players. “You’re going to war with a corporation that owns a day of the week,” an associate warns Omalu inConcussion. Yet despite the NFL’s obstructionism, the connection between repetitive head injury and neurodegenerative disease has only grown stronger with time. While many athletes who suffer concussions do not go on to develop CTE, every time it crops up in an autopsy it’s in someone who “had a history of repetitive hits to the head,” says Robert Stern, director of the clinical core of the Alzheimer’s Disease Center at the Boston University School of Medicine.

Image: “FPYC Soccer – 01” by Jarek Tuszynski / CC-BY-SA-3.0. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons – https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:FPYC_Soccer_-_01.JPG#/media/File:FPYC_Soccer_-_01.JPG

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