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Subject: [gatornews] Editorial: Sports injuries ... damage lingers
after games
From: John Vega <[email protected]>
Date: Fri, October 02, 2009 10:58 am
To: GatorNews <[email protected]>
Editorial: Sports injuries ... damage lingers after games
By Staff Reports
Thursday, October 1, 2009
In the third quarter of last Saturday’s game against Kentucky, college football’s most exciting player, University of Florida quarterback Tim Tebow, went down with a concussion. That happens when your head collides with the knee of a 6-foot-5, 320-pound lineman.
Tebow spent the night in the hospital and was flown the next day back to Gainesville, where he has undergone a battery of tests that will be compared to a neurological baseline.
Although the decision on when he resumes play is up to medical professionals, no one should underestimate the pressure from fans, fellow players and most certainly Tebow himself to get back on the field.
The importance of care in these injuries was made startlingly evident by a University of Michigan study that the incidence of memory-related diseases like Alzheimer’s and dementia among retired pro-football players over 50 was five times the rate of the general population’s, and for former players between 30 and 49, perhaps reflecting their greater speed and size, it was as much as 19 times the normal rate for that age group.
The National Football League pointed out that the study, of 1,063 ex-players who had played at least three seasons, was done by phone and it was left to the players — or their caregivers — to say whether they had ever been diagnosed with memory-related disease.
It may not be the most scientific study, but clearly there is something there that does merit scientific study. The other parts of the study equally made sense. The former players, perhaps because of their conditioning, suffered significantly lower rates of heart attacks and asthma, but, because of the damage the game does to joints, are afflicted with arthritis at almost twice the rate of the general population.
The medical specialists who will have to deal with this face significant cultural hurdles. The football ethos has always been to suck it up and play hurt. Indeed, one of Tebow’s teammates was quoted as saying, with typical gridiron fatalism, “... everyone gets concussions. Stuff like that happens.”
Careers are short, and for ex-players the phrase “memories of the game” should not be an oxymoron.
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