How Can Proactive Health Care Better Protect Our Athletes?
It’s that time of year again. (No, not the holiday season.) I’m talking about the annual American ritual of watching two professional football teams face off in the mother of all games: the Super Bowl, of course. But as millions of Americans glue themselves to TVs every Sunday until the big game itself, we should remember that for football players, there are enormous risks in this thrilling sport.
The Ongoing Risks for Players
Last year I wrote an article for Quartz on the eve of the Super Bowl in which I spoke as both a proponent of Powering Precision Health and as a diehard football fan. In that piece, I lauded the NFL’s efforts to improve its concussion protocol but pointed out we still don’t have a reliable way to monitor athletes’ brain health.
So, how have things changed in the past year? We still don’t have enough research or information to provide the proactive health care that players deserve. That’s not due to negligence – indeed, the NFL has proven itself proactive in some ways on this issue – but because we have not yet developed the blood test that would effectively detect CTE. Ongoing efforts in this area are still badly needed. Alarmingly, a 2017 American Medical Association paper found that out of 111 brains donated by deceased NFL players to medical science, 110 were proven to have CTE.
Recent Advances in Proactive Health Care
In late 2018, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved the marketing of the first- ever blood test to help evaluate whether or not people have had concussions. This itself had followed a 2017 study that showed a link between the biomarker protein neurofilament light (NfL) and instances of brain injury or concussion. (The fact that this breakthrough biomarker is called NfL, by the way, is pure coincidence.)
Subsequently, Banyan Biomarkers developed the blood test the FDA would go on to approve – one that, while not specifically detecting CTE, can rule out the necessity of a CT scan. Given that evidence points to CTE as the result of repeated head injuries, our ability to detect such harm in players could go a long way toward detecting or preventing CTE – or other neurodegenerative diseases.
But the risk to football players – as well as athletes in all other contact sports including hockey, rugby, boxing, and martial arts – goes beyond concussion and CTE. A recent Boston University study found that people who play contact sports are at greater risk of developing Parkinson’s disease too. NfL is also linked to Parkinson’s, specifically in the context of distinguishing Parkinson’s from related disorders, but efforts to develop a diagnostic tool using biomarkers to track disease progression are ongoing.
The Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s research, an organization doing much to drive disruptive innovation in health care, launched its Parkinson’s Progression Markers Initiative (PPMI) in 2010 to find biomarkers that can help discover if therapies designed to treat the disease are working. And just this year, IBM partnered with the Michael J. Fox Foundation to use artificial intelligence for the purpose of seeing how Parkinson’s develops and progresses within unique individuals, ultimately guiding the development of targeted therapies and treatments. Professional sports leagues like the NFL and NHL should pay close attention to this work, given the newly discovered risk of athletes developing Parkinson’s.
How We Can Give Back to Our Athletes
We have come a long way in adopting the right approach to proactively tackling the threat of CTE to athletes. With both CTE and Parkinson’s, we need more research, better technology and a willingness to find solutions.
Thankfully, many professional sports leagues and organizations are onboard with the Powering Precision Health movement and care about the well-being of their players. Those of us who take such great pleasure in rough-and-tumble games have a special obligation to work tirelessly on the part of players’ safety. So please take a moment during this year’s Super Bowl to consider the athletes out on the field – and support the work being done by those of us in the Powering Precision Health (PPH) movement. To learn more, watch the PPH 2018 highlights here or contact us here.