Name: 【TED】Chris Nowinski: Can I have your brain? The quest for truth on concussions and CTE (Can I have your brain? The quest for truth on concussions and CTE | Chris Nowinski)
Uploaded: 2018-05-01T11:15:15.000Z
Duration: 11 min 21 s
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I'm Chris Nowinski, and odds are if you've met me in the last five years

I've asked you, after a few minutes, a bit of an odd question:

Now, it only seems like a strange question if you don't know my story

I grew up outside of Chicago, and I was an athlete

and I was very lucky to get recruited to play football at Harvard University.

And then after graduating, like most Harvard graduates,

Sure you remember me from Monday Night Raw in 2002 and 2003,

playing what people affectionately like to call

I got kicked in the head by my colleague Bubba Ray Dudley,

And it led to what became permanent postconcussion symptoms:

constant headaches, inability to sleep, depression, feeling in a fog.

I tried to figure out how could I make this pain go away.

And I wasn't getting the answers I needed from doctors,

and so I started digging into the medical literature.

And I found there's this whole story about concussions

called "Head Games: Football's Concussion Crisis"

But in that process, I learned it's not really just about concussions.

I learned about a disease called chronic traumatic encephalopathy or CTE.

What we used to call punch-drunk, because we only knew about it from boxers.

We knew that getting hit in the head too many times with boxers

would cause their brain to essentially start to rot, to degenerate.

like memory problems and problems with cognition,

depression, impulse control issues, aggression.

in which the first two NFL players were studied for this disease.

The first was Mike Webster, 50 years old, already had dementia.

The second, Terry Long, 45 years old when he took his life.

The medical examiner in Pittsburgh decided to look at their brains

and I thought people would make a big deal out of it.

But shockingly, even when the first two cases came in positive,

there was never a national news story about this,

what's going on in football with these cases of CTE.

and one day I read the newspaper -- November 20, 2006.

I find out that Andre Waters just took his life.

Andre Waters was someone I grew up watching.

Former Philadelphia Eagles strong safety,

[44] years old, a Division II football coach

when he decided to put a gun to his head.

In the article they reminded me, his nickname was Dirty Waters.

did he ever talk about the concussions he had.

And I found a quote from 1994 where Andre Waters said,

"I stopped counting my concussions at 15.

I wouldn't say anything, I'd just sniff smelling salts and go back out there."

And I thought, I wonder if he might have CTE, too.

If that might have contributed to whatever made him choose to end his life.

So I ended up calling the doctor who did the first two studies, and I said,

"Hey, I think you should study Andre Waters."

The problem is, the first two cases died in the county in which I work,

and I could study them as part of my job.

I can't do that with Andre Waters, he died in Florida.

If you want me to study him, you're going to have to figure out

and I thought, why don't I call the medical examiner

So I called up the medical examiner in Florida, and I said,

"Hey, you don't know me, but do you still have the brain of Andre Waters?"

I said, "OK, are you going to study him for CTE?"

And he said no, in fact at that time he didn't believe that was a real disease.

I said, "OK, if you're not, do you mind if I have it?"

But if you do get the permission of his next of kin,

And then I realized I had to figure out who his next of kin was and ask them,

and it turned out it was Andre Waters's 88-year-old mother.

【TED】Chris Nowinski: Can I have your brain? The quest for truth on concussions and CTE (Can I have your brain? The quest for truth on concussions and CTE | Chris Nowinski)

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【TED】Chris Nowinski: Can I have your brain? The quest for truth on concussions and CTE (Can I have your brain? The quest for truth on concussions and CTE | Chris Nowinski)

figure

depression

positive

severe