The importance of sportspeople donating their brains to research has again been hailed as a vital step in helping to better understand neurodegenerative disease, its causes and how it could be prevented.
Dr Judith Gates, co-founder and chair of Head for Change, said that while it is a “painful choice” for families to take, such a brave decision can help to effect the change that is needed to protect future generations.
Her husband Bill, a former defender for Middlesbrough and Spennymoor Town, has sports-related dementia which his family believe may be Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE), but that can only be confirmed by postmortem.
Speaking at the world’s first adult header free match, the Bill Gates Celebration Trophy, Dr Gates spoke of the importance of brain donation.
“We need to have brains, the only definitive proof comes from a postmortem examination, and we cannot make the distinction between sports-related neurodegenerative disease, such as between Alzheimer’s and CTE, definitively until then,” she told NR Times.
“I would encourage families, while recognising it is a painful choice to make, to donate the brain of their loved one.
“I hope we (the Brain Banks and families) can all come together and take this issue forward.”
Neuropathologist Professor Willie Stewart, who has led several groundbreaking research studies into the impact of heading in football, oversees a ‘Brain Bank’ which holds the world’s largest collection of brain tissue at the Queen Elizabeth University Hospital in Glasgow.
And only last week, another UK Brain Bank was created through the Concussion Legacy Project, a partnership between the Concussion Legacy Foundation and Jeff Astle Foundation, with the aim of finding a cure for CTE by 2040.
England Rugby World Cup winner Steve Thompson became the first to pledge his brain to the Concussion Legacy Project at its launch.
The landmark football match, held at Spennymoor Town’s Brewery Field, was held to raise awareness of the dangers of heading.
Research from Professor Stewart has helped to lay bare the reality players face, with his FIELD study showing that former professional footballers had an approximately three-and-a-half-times higher rate of death due to neurodegenerative disease than the general population.
It also revealed that, for goalkeepers, neurodegenerative disease risk was similar to general population levels – but for outfield players was almost four times higher than expected and varied by player position with risk highest among defenders, at around five-fold higher risk.
