Players who suffered multiple concussions are at high risk, so why is a charity and not sporting authorities leading the way?There’s the damage you can see, and the damage you can’t. A new study by the UK rugby health project at Durham University has shown that professional rugby players are more likely to have mental health issues in retirement than athletes in non-contact sports, and that those who suffered multiple concussions during their playing career are at even greater risk of depression, anxiety, sleep and anger issues.The study suggests a strong association between head trauma and mental health in both codes of rugby, and provides evidence of what many people working in the field already believe to be true: rugby...
Governing body’s posturing over the cause of early onset dementia among ex-players is extraordinarily insensitive So it’s not the brain injuries after all. Those rugby players diagnosed with dementia in their early 40s, steadily growing in number, must be comforted to learn that the repetitive brain trauma they suffered in their playing careers is but one of 12 modifiable risk factors that might have contributed to their conditions.This is the latest angle World Rugby has come up with, as the posturing continues in advance of impending lawsuits. Here we are, nearly a year since rugby union was rocked by the news that eight of its former players were suing the sport after their diagnoses of dementia, with scores more of...
The NFL now has 30 medical professionals at each game as it grapples with rule changes and greater head-injury awarenessWe are high above the plush seats in the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, the NFL’s chief medical officer and I, watching the Atlanta Falcons’ Cordarrelle Patterson getting dumped on his back. “As he throws the ball, keep an eye on his head,” Dr Allen Sills says. The tackle looks innocuous, at least at first. But then Sills asks a technician in the video review booth to slow down the footage before viewing it from another angle. Now it is clear that, as Patterson falls, his head spanks the turf and ricochets up. The incident, from the NFL game in London on Sunday...
New research points to small, repetitive blows damaging rugby players’ brains, but boxing established this decades agoThey hanged Del Fontaine at Wandsworth prison early on Tuesday 29 October 1935, three months and 19 days after he shot his girlfriend Hilda Meek having overheard her arranging a date on the phone and convinced himself she was seeing another man. Protesters picketed the prison the day they killed him, one told the papers that “they’re hanging an insane man”. Fontaine was a boxer, and had been a good one, twice the middleweight champion of Canada, but that was behind him. He had lost 11 fights in the last year, in the last he was knocked down four times in the first round.When...
New research points to small, repetitive blows damaging rugby players’ brains, but boxing established this decades agoThey hanged Del Fontaine at Wandsworth prison early on Tuesday 29 October 1935, three months and 19 days after he shot his girlfriend Hilda Meek having overheard her arranging a date on the phone and convinced himself she was seeing another man. Protesters picketed the prison the day they killed him, one told the papers that “they’re hanging an insane man”. Fontaine was a boxer, and had been a good one, twice the middleweight champion of Canada, but that was behind him. He had lost 11 fights in the last year, in the last he was knocked down four times in the first round.When...