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CTE confirmed for 1st time in live person, according to exam of ex-NFL player
John KeilmanContact ReporterChicago Tribune
Four years ago, researchers from Evanston’s NorthShore University HealthSystem and other scientific organizations announced they had used brain scans to detect the hallmark of chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, in ex-NFL players while they were still alive — a technique that promised to spur more accurate diagnoses, and possibly new treatments.
The scans indicated the presence of tau, a protein that builds up over damaged brain cells. But the scientists cautioned that the results needed to be confirmed, because CTE, a dementia-like disease linked to repetitive head trauma, can be definitively diagnosed only by examining brain tissue after a person’s death.
The Neurosurgery paper says its subject played football for 22 years, including 12 in the NFL. He had only one reported concussion, suffered when he was in college, and didn’t even have his “bell rung” very often.
When he was done playing, he went through law school, joined a firm and became partner. A few years after that, though, he was dismissed for poor performance. The same thing happened at least twice more until he finally stopped practicing law and filed for bankruptcy.
By the time he was 59, he was showing distressing behavioral traits researchers believe are signs of CTE: memory loss, depression, a lack of impulse control and a bad temper. Two years later, his motor skills deteriorated until he couldn’t feed himself.
Toward the end of his life, McNeill was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a disease that causes muscles to weaken and waste away, along with presumptive CTE. He died at 63.
Brain scans are just one diagnostic tool scientists are trying to develop to combat CTE. Researchers at Boston University announced in September they had found higher levels of a protein called CCL11 in the brains of people diagnosed with CTE, and that it might be possible to use that as a biomarker to detect the disease in the living.
But Dr. Lili-Naz Hazrati, a neuroscience researcher at Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children, said no matter the technology, reliable CTE detection still appears far away.
She said the tissue images included in the Neurosurgery paper did not convince her that the ex-NFL player actually was suffering from CTE. Tau is associated with other neurological diseases, including Alzheimer’s, and can also be present in healthy brains, she said.
Figuring out a way to definitively diagnose the disease in living people is important because early detection improves the odds of successful treatment, she said. But she said scientists have yet to find biomarkers that identify Alzheimer’s — a disease that has been studied for more than a century — and CTE will likely prove no easier.
“When there’s such a diversity (of diagnostic techniques) and no one seems to be finding the same thing, it’s really hard to validate the findings,” she said.
Dr. Julian Bailes, a NorthShore neurosurgeon, said Wednesday that confirmation has arrived.
In a paper published last week in the journal Neurosurgery, Bailes and other researchers reported that one of the former players who underwent a scan had his brain examined after he died — and sure enough, the tissue revealed he had been suffering from CTE.
Minnesota Vikings who died in 2015.
Four years ago, researchers announced that they had used brain scans to detect the hallmark of CTE. (Nov. 16, 2017)
Dr. Bennet Omalu, the pioneering CTE researcher portrayed by actor Will Smith in the 2015 movie “Concussion,” is the lead author on the Neurosurgery paper. Last year Omalu told CNN that McNeill underwent the tau-detecting brain scan. After McNeill’s death, Omalu said he found signs of CTE in the athlete’s brain tissue.
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