Source: Pittsburgh Tribune-Review
Knocked out of the ring by a string of concussions, former World Wrestling Entertainment grappler Chris Nowinski, 30, has tag-teamed with a group of Boston University experts on Alzheimer’s disease and other brain injuries to woo players or their next-of-kin to donate the athletes’ gray matter.
Nowinski reaches out to professional and collegiate players still alive and cold-calls the widows of retired athletes listed in obituaries he scans over morning coffee. Every few months, he scores an autopsied brain battered by years of concussions.
Concussions are nothing new to professional athletes. Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger, for example, takes the field today against the San Diego Chargers a mere two weeks after suffering his third concussion, one so severe that he left Heinz Field on a stretcher.
Armed with $100,000 from the National Institutes of Health, Nowinski’s nonprofit Sports Legacy Institute has banked a dozen brains, including tissue from former Steelers Mike Webster, Terry Long and Justin Strzelczyk — men who died relatively young after exhibiting increasingly erratic behavior, impaired memory and other symptoms researchers tie to repetitive head trauma.
“The phone calls are very difficult, but now, more people are becoming aware of our work. A lot of widows, NFL wives, are supporting our work, and they talk to each other about it. They want something positive to come out of a tragedy,” said Nowinski, a former all-Ivy League defensive tackle who parlayed his Harvard degree in sociology into graduate study at Killer Kowalski’s Pro Wrestling School.
Named WWE’s “Newcomer of the Year” after his 2001 debut, Nowinski found himself getting routinely smacked, squished and swung around the ring by beefy brawlers such as Maven, D’Lo Brown and the Dudley Boyz. A blow to his skull in 2003 led to nearly five years of medical care.
He says he’s “about 100 percent OK,” but fears potentially hidden longterm ailments such as Alzheimer’s disease, depression and chronic traumatic encephalopathy, known as “punch-drunk syndrome,” that affects many retired boxers, football players and hockey players.
“I still have a scar on my cheek. I was part of a tag team, and I was knocked off the ring. I couldn’t see. I was trying to tag him, and I couldn’t see him because of the concussion,” Nowinski said.
“You know, I never thought I had a concussion until after the one knocked me out of wrestling. I had played years of football, but no one told me about the symptoms of concussions. Once I learned about them, I started counting. I had concussions going back to when I was 19.”
Players reeling from concussions might black out; their vision becomes blurred and their speech, slurred. They might suffer from dizziness, fatigue, headaches, amnesia, ringing in the ears, poor sleep and mood swings tied to the trauma.
Over time, head trauma can form tangled deposits inside the cells of the brain and spinal cord. These clotted nerve fibers are made of dots called “tau protein.” Researchers have found that tau sediments become heavier over the years — sometimes decades after the initial hit and in different parts of the brain from where the trauma occurred.
Researchers suspect that these tau build-ups eventually trigger catastrophic dementia such as the chronic traumatic encephalopathy that affected Webster, Long and Strzelczyk and deceased Oilers linebacker John Grimsley, who was accidentally killed in February while cleaning a gun.
“The damage is inside the brain. On the outside, you might be seeing what appears to be a healthy person undergoing an invisible disability,” said Dr. Robert Stern, a professor of neurology at Boston University’s School of Medicine and co-director of the Alzheimer’s Disease Clinical and Research Program.
“John Grimsley was 45 when he died. For several years before his death, he was showing signs of cognitive degeneration. But he probably hadn’t had a concussion for 15 years because he wasn’t playing football. His brain, however, is chock full o’ these tangles,” Stern said.
That’s important to Stern because chronic traumatic encephalopathy is the only preventable cause of dementia. Finding genetic markers that might predispose certain people to the degenerative disease or inventing ways to mitigate existing damage could save thousands of victims — not just athletes — from the tragedy of declining mental health, he said.
“The only way to get to the point of preventing it is to objectively do the research,” Stern said. “That’s why the brain bank is so important.”
Each of the dozen brains stored in the Bedford, Mass., bank featured large tau protein deposits that normally don’t appear in brains of people who forgo high-contact occupations.
In April, Stern is scheduled to begin overseeing a clinical program that will chart the mental health of a variety of athletes from different sports over their lifetimes. So far, 30 men and women have pledged to take part in the clinic and donate their brains after they die.
Although no current Steelers, Pirates or Penguins have enlisted, former Pittsburgh defenseman Noah Welch, now with the Florida Panthers, has signed up, along with pro boxer Termite Watkins, hockey great Pat LaFontaine, soccer star Cindy Parlow, and Ben Lynch, once a center for the 49ers and Texans.
“Chris made the pitch, but it wasn’t a hard one for him to make. It was a very easy decision,” said Lynch, 36. “I think we need to be proactive about these issues. What happened to ‘Iron Mike’ Webster maybe played into it, because he was a hero of mine and for any other center.
“For me, I don’t see it as any different than putting a sticker on my driver’s license that said I want to be an organ donor. Some guys kind of recoil when you mention that you want them to donate their brains, but for a lot of us it’s no different than donating a liver or a heart to someone who needs it.”
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