Spectre of brain injury casts long shadow over American campuses

College football, the game's entry point to the NFL, is under scrutiny after spate of sports injury-related deaths

- Nathan Kalman-Lamb Derek Silva

It is clearly the duty of the colleges which have permitted these monstrous evils to grow up and become intense to purge themselves of such immoralities. Intercollegiate and interscholastic football ought to be prohibited until a reasonable game has been formulated.

Those were the words of Harvard University president Charles W. Eliot in 1906, a year after three college players died playing American football, part of a spate of deaths that led many universities to abandon the sport. Sadly, Eliot's words resonate as if written today: on 29 November, Alabama A&M linebacker Medrick Burnett Jr. died from a head injury he had suffered in a game the previous month. He was just 20 years old.

Evidently, American football remains the fundamentally unsafe enterprise Eliot saw it to be. While the death of a player such as Burnett should be enough to reevaluate the place of this sport in U.S. schools—and eight players died in a single month from injuries sustained playing the sport earlier this year—in the days since Burnett's passing, two more high-school players have been hospitalized with brain injuries.

World-renowned neurologist and neuropathologist Ann McKee has revealed that contact sport athletes under 30 have a significantly increased chance of contracting chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a degenerative brain condition associated with head injuries—concussive and subconcussive.

CTE has a range of harmful health consequences including "memory loss, confusion, impaired judgment, impulse control problems, aggression, depression, anxiety, suicidality, parkinsonism, and, eventually, progressive dementia." McKee recently said, based on her Boston University lab's research findings, that "the fact that over 40% of young contact and collision sport athletes in the UNITE brain bank have CTE is remarkable—considering that studies of community brain banks show that fewer than 1% of the general population has CTE."