Seau had brain disease

BARRY WILNER

AP Pro Foot­ball Writer

Junior Seau, one of the NFL’s best and fiercest play­ers for nearly two decades, had a degen­er­a­tive brain dis­ease when he com­mit­ted sui­cide last May, the National Insti­tutes of Health told The Asso­ci­ated Press on Thursday.

Results of an NIH study of Seau’s brain revealed abnor­mal­i­ties con­sis­tent with chronic trau­matic encephalopa­thy (CTE).

“The brain was inde­pen­dently eval­u­ated by mul­ti­ple experts, in a blind fash­ion,” said Dr. Rus­sell Lonser, who over­saw the study. “We had the oppor­tu­nity to get mul­ti­ple experts involved in a way they wouldn’t be able to directly iden­tify his tis­sue even if they knew he was one of the indi­vid­u­als studied.”

The NIH, based in Bethesda, Md., con­ducted a study of three uniden­ti­fied brains, one of which was Seau’s. It said the find­ings on Seau were sim­i­lar to autop­sies of peo­ple “with expo­sure to repet­i­tive head injuries.”

Seau’s fam­ily requested the analy­sis of his brain.

Seau was a star line­backer for 20 NFL sea­sons with San Diego, Miami and New Eng­land before retir­ing in 2009. He died of a self-inflicted shot­gun wound.

He joins a list of sev­eral dozen foot­ball play­ers who had CTE. Boston University’s cen­ter for study of the dis­ease reported last month that 34 for­mer pro play­ers and nine who played only col­lege foot­ball suf­fered from CTE.

“I was not sur­prised after learn­ing a lit­tle about CTE that he had it,” Seau’s 23-year-old son Tyler said. “He did play so many years at that level. I was more just kind of angry I didn’t do some­thing more and have the aware­ness to help him more, and now it is too late.

“I don’t think any of us were aware of the side effects that could be going on with head trauma until he passed away. We didn’t know his behav­ior was from head trauma.”

That behav­ior, accord­ing to Tyler Seau and Junior’s ex-wife Gina, included wild mood swings, irra­tional­ity, for­get­ful­ness, insom­nia and depression.

“He emo­tion­ally detached him­self and would kind of ‘go away’ for a lit­tle bit,” Tyler Seau said. “And then the depres­sion and things like that. It started to pro­gres­sively get worse.”

He hid it well in pub­lic, they said. But not when he was with fam­ily or close friends.

The NFL faces law­suits by thou­sands of for­mer play­ers who say the league with­held infor­ma­tion on the harm­ful effects con­cus­sions can have on their health.

“We appre­ci­ate the Seau family’s coop­er­a­tion with the National Insti­tutes of Health,” the league said in an email state­ment to the AP. “The find­ing under­scores the rec­og­nized need for addi­tional research to accel­er­ate a fuller under­stand­ing of CTE.

“The NFL, both directly and in part­ner­ship with the NIH, Cen­ters for Dis­ease Con­trol and other lead­ing orga­ni­za­tions, is com­mit­ted to sup­port­ing a wide range of inde­pen­dent med­ical and sci­en­tific research that will both address CTE and pro­mote the long-term health and safety of ath­letes at all levels.”

NFL teams have given a $30 mil­lion research grant to the NIH.

Posted by Jon Kleinknecht on Jan 10 2013. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.