Junior Seau Found Dead in Home

#151
#151
Just wondering did Seau have multiple concussions ? -- I didnt really follow his career, probably a question for a die hard Charger fan to answer
 
#152
#152
508mikey said:
Just wondering did Seau have multiple concussions ? -- I didnt really follow his career, probably a question for a die hard Charger fan to answer
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He played ILB for 20 years in the NFL in 268 games with over 1500 tackles. What do you think?
 
#153
#153
508mikey said:
Just wondering did Seau have multiple concussions ? -- I didnt really follow his career, probably a question for a die hard Charger fan to answer
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A grade I concussion occurs when someone sees stars. With that in mind, I'd say he had at least 1500 grade I concussions in his lifetime.

Seau played more than 30 years. He played at the highest level. It's a safe bet to say he experienced grade II or above concussions in the double-digits. Dozens, if not more. I mean, one every other year is 15.
 
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#155
#155
Vercingetorix said:
There will be something called football. But it will look a lot different.

The lawsuits are one prong of it. The other will be medical technology. Right now you have to be dead before they can dissect your brain and see the damage. But at some point they're going to come up with a scanner that will show the damage while you're still alive. That'll destroy the sport.
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Yup. Once the imaging technology catches up, the causation argument will be airtight. It's at this point that the plaintiffs will be able to win lawsuits.
 
#156
#156
HSVol said:
(1)
So when did the NFL go to an 18 game schedule? I must've missed that.

(2)
And since when was the NFL a medical research company? Is it their responsibility to conduct advanced medical research?

(3)
And you can't be serious about colleges not making billions on football. College football runs collegiate athletics and has for a long time.

(4)
My point about high schools and colleges is that they've been much slower to respond to medical research than the NFL.

Ok. Thanks for correcting me on Duerson.
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(1)
They tried in the most recent CBA.

(2)
This is a "should have known" standard. The NFL isn't an advanced medical research institute, but it can't put its head in the sand when there is publicly accessible research information.

(3)
Right, college football money runs the entire athletic department. But this is entirely different than a for-profit entity turning a handsome profit.

(4)
How has the NFL responded in ways that college hasn't?
 
#157
#157
Kingston Vol said:
Football will survive only if they adapt and make the game more safe. I think they're on the right track.
Posted via VolNation Mobile
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How in the world are they on right track?

The only answers to the question of how to make football more safe are to "play less football" (see, kickoff changes).

If the only answer is to "play less football" -- and there is a substantial amount of literature illustrating that helmets are not the answer; that there is no technology that can absord the force of the collisions -- then I am not bullish about the long-term prospects of football.
 
#158
#158
HSVol said:
You really didn't provide much substance to the allegation that the league did "nothing" after the 2007 report, so I didn't accept that as a legitimate argument. In 2007, you were 14 years old. I doubt you really had any idea what the league was/wasn't doing at the time.

Then again, I didn't get to watch much football that year, either.
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Are you asking for proof that nothing was done in 2007?

How about you show that something was done. That'd be a good place to start.
 
#159
#159
_vol said:
He played ILB for 20 years in the NFL in 268 games with over 1500 tackles. What do you think?
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Of all the articles written so far, no concussions have been mentioned and his ex wife says he never complained of any, in several I have read (that mentioned her). No one will ever know why he did it - he could have killed himself other ways, besides a gun, to preserve the brain. Note- driving off a cliff isnt going to preserve it -- so no, I am not buying the concussion theory
 
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#160
#160
Kingston Vol said:
It's probably one of the reasons why boxing is irrelevent today. The best athletes don't fight anymore because the sport couldn't adapt.
Posted via VolNation Mobile
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This is part of it. But another huge factor is that boxing is a complete clusterfunk. If it was reasonably organized and not corrupt, it would have remained more popular.

If boxing had leadership like the UFC does, it would be as popular as UFC.
 
#161
#161
508mikey said:
Of all the articles written so far, no concussions have been mentioned and his ex wife says he never complained of any, in several I have read (that mentioned her). No one will ever know why he did it - he could have killed himself other ways, besides a gun, to preserve the brain. Note- driving off a cliff isnt going to preserve it -- so no, I am not buying the concussion theory
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They had a guy on espn the other day who was a professional soccer player who had to retire from post-concussion syndrome. Maybe y'all know his name? I don't recall.

Anyway, he tells a story about how he was living in Boston in the same apartment complex as Seau, and he sees Seau and says something to him about how he had a concussion and about how his head still hurts. Seau replied "I don't know how many concussions I've had, and I don't know the last time my head didn't hurt".
 
#162
#162
508mikey said:
Of all the articles written so far, no concussions have been mentioned and his ex wife says he never complained of any, in several I have read (that mentioned her). No one will ever know why he did it - he could have killed himself other ways, besides a gun, to preserve the brain. Note- driving off a cliff isnt going to preserve it -- so no, I am not buying the concussion theory
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Current medical research has shown pretty conclusively that it's not even concussions that are the problem, per se -- it's more the repetitive effect of many hits, even those that are subconcussive. That's what causes the build up of tau proteins, and that's what destroys the brain. They've dissected the brains of a couple of high school players and found abnormally high tau protein buildup. It's not just the concussions, it's getting hit in the head over and over and over.
 
#163
#163
kidbourbon said:
They had a guy on espn the other day who was a professional soccer player who had to retire from post-concussion syndrome. Maybe y'all know his name? I don't recall.

Anyway, he tells a story about how he was living in Boston in the same apartment complex as Seau, and he sees Seau and says something to him about how he had a concussion and about how his head still hurts. Seau replied "I don't know how many concussions I've had, and I don't know the last time my head didn't hurt".
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Prolly Taylor Twellman.
 
#164
#164
Here's what it looks like. The brown spots are tau proteins, which build up in brain cells and eventually kill them. Right now you have to dissect a player's brain to see the damage. Eventually they'll be able to see it in living brains and the sport as we know it will end right then.

John-Grimsley.jpg
 
#165
#165
Vercingetorix said:
Current medical research has shown pretty conclusively that it's not even concussions that are the problem, per se -- it's more the repetitive effect of many hits, even those that are subconcussive. That's what causes the build up of tau proteins, and that's what destroys the brain. They've dissected the brains of a couple of high school players and found abnormally high tau protein buildup. It's not just the concussions, it's getting hit in the head over and over and over.
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The calcification of protein remnent. For some reason, unknown at this time, some folks flush it others do not. Those that do not suffer the results of the calcification.
 
#166
#166
_vol said:
The calcification of protein remnent. For some reason, unknown at this time, some folks flush it others do not. Those that do not suffer the results of the calcification.
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I'm not an expert. All I've read is that tau protein buildup is what is supposed to cause dementia in Alzheimer's patients. And that's what the NFL players' brains that have been dissected look like -- Alzheimer's patients. None of the stuff I've read has mentioned that some people are immune to it and some aren't.

The stained tissue of Alzheimer’s patients typically shows the two trademarks of the disease—distinctive patterns of the proteins beta-amyloid and tau. Beta-amyloid is thought to lay the groundwork for dementia. Tau marks the critical second stage of the disease: it’s the protein that steadily builds up in brain cells, shutting them down and ultimately killing them. An immunostain of an Alzheimer’s patient looks, under the microscope, as if the tissue had been hit with a shotgun blast: the red and brown marks, corresponding to amyloid and tau, dot the entire surface. But this patient’s brain was different. There was damage only to specific surface regions of his brain, and the stains for amyloid came back negative. “This was all tau,” Ann McKee, who runs the hospital’s neuropathology laboratory, said. “There was not even a whiff of amyloid. And it was the most extraordinary damage. It was one of those cases that really took you aback.” The patient may have been in an Alzheimer’s facility, and may have looked and acted as if he had Alzheimer’s. But McKee realized that he had a different condition, called chronic traumatic encephalopathy (C.T.E.), which is a progressive neurological disorder found in people who have suffered some kind of brain trauma. C.T.E. has many of the same manifestations as Alzheimer’s: it begins with behavioral and personality changes, followed by disinhibition and irritability, before moving on to dementia. And C.T.E. appears later in life as well, because it takes a long time for the initial trauma to give rise to nerve-cell breakdown and death. But C.T.E. isn’t the result of an endogenous disease. It’s the result of injury. The patient, it turned out, had been a boxer in his youth. He had suffered from dementia for fifteen years because, decades earlier, he’d been hit too many times in the head.
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#167
#167
Vercingetorix said:
I'm not an expert. All I've read is that tau protein buildup is what is supposed to cause dementia in Alzheimer's patients. And that's what the NFL players' brains that have been dissected look like -- Alzheimer's patients. None of the stuff I've read has mentioned that some people are immune to it and some aren't.
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Of course no one is immune to trauma, but resilience is quite different. A lot of folks shown differing amounts of resistance to substantive build-up.
 
#169
#169
kidbourbon said:
They had a guy on espn the other day who was a professional soccer player who had to retire from post-concussion syndrome. Maybe y'all know his name? I don't recall.

Anyway, he tells a story about how he was living in Boston in the same apartment complex as Seau, and he sees Seau and says something to him about how he had a concussion and about how his head still hurts. Seau replied "I don't know how many concussions I've had, and I don't know the last time my head didn't hurt".
Click to expand...

Severe depression causes a persons head to hurt -- IMO he masked it well, like so many other people that have commited suicide -- this to me sounds more like Kenny McKinnley than Duerson
 
#170
#170
kidbourbon said:
Do you have any literature on this you could link?
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I am not just speaking specifically about head trauma. Resilience is evident in cancer patients, to diabetics, to you name it. Just stating that resilience is a difficult variable to juggle, especially when it comes to the brain as we tend to know very little compared to other parts of the body.

In the case of head trauma differences in physiology from person to person plays a roll, size of the individual, nutrion, etc... It's a difficult nut to crack and to put level numbers to across the board and I certainly do not envy the challenge facing the researchers in this now highly public and politicized debate on theoretical medical science as we sit here presently.
 
#171
#171
508mikey said:
Severe depression causes a persons head to hurt -- IMO he masked it well, like so many other people that have commited suicide -- this to me sounds more like Kenny McKinnley than Duerson
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You either didn't read any of what I wrote, or you read what I wrote but your mind is already made up and so you simply disregard a very probative bit of evidence that Seau's head constantly hurt, and it hurt from concussion on top of concussion.

Also, severe depression may cause some headaches but it doesn't cause your head to hurt all the time.
 
#172
#172
Listened to my favorite drive time sports program on the radio today, and one of the hosts who was a four year starter at BYU and had a brief stint in the NFL said he's not going to allow either of his sons to play football. This seems like an increasingly common sentiment, especially among former NFL players.
 
#173
#173
I guess the Pro Bowl style of football is up next -- rather odd how the players from the leather helmet era didnt complain like this
 
#174
#174
508mikey said:
I guess the Pro Bowl style of football is up next -- rather odd how the players from the leather helmet era didn't complain like this
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The leather helmet guys didn't run 4.3, weigh 250 lbs or have the benefit of pads all over their body.

The problem with the pads and helmet is that they make you more willing to strike the opposition. Guys look for any opportunity to blow guys up rather than just making the tackle.
 
#175
#175
Not to mention that the medical technology didn't exist during the leather helmet era to identify CTE to begin with.

The fans who act like this is some kind of a toughness issue are absolute fools.
 
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