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I’ve recently made several videos in which I criticize people who claim to care about children. I think it’s finally time that I make a video in which I actually call out a way that our society is actually harming children and efforts to stop it from happening. Because right now in the United States, we are allowing millions of children to choose a lifestyle that will give them permanent, life-altering physical changes that are irreversible and can be absolutely devastating. Parents and even schools are allowing this to happen because it’s not seen as “politically correct” to call it out. Well, I for one am willing to put myself out there because frankly I care more about our nation’s children than I do about being seen as “respectful” of this damaging culture.
That’s right, it’s another video about American football. Why, what did you think I was talking about?
I swear I’ll stop talking about hand egg for awhile after this one, but I just couldn’t help it because there have been TWO studies published in the past two weeks with the stark, absolutely unquestionable evidence showing that football is royally fucking up kids’ brains.
First up was this study in Nature: Longitudinal changes in resting state fMRI brain self-similarity of asymptomatic high school American football athletes. Here’s what that means–researchers gathered 40 high school football players (high school in the US is approximately ages 14 to 18, so teenage boys) and gave them functional MRI brain scans that measured their brain connectivity before the football season started. They scanned them again just after the season started, again near the end of the season, and one final time one to three months after the season concluded. They also fit each subject’s helmet with a sensor that would detect “head acceleration events,” or HAEs, giving them a good idea of how many times each player got their brains scrambled a bit. While major injuries like concussions are relatively rare, researchers suspect that high school football players experience hundreds and even thousands of HAEs each season.
The researchers compared each player’s later scans to their earlier scans, and what they found was that brain connectivity changed drastically by the later half of the season, with players who experienced more HAEs showing larger differences between scans.
The sort of good news is that a few months after the season ended, the players’ brain connectivity seemed to go back to looking like the preseason scans. We know that our brains are extremely plastic–it’s an incredible organ that is constantly repairing itself and forming new connections. So it’s great that maybe with enough time between seasons kids might recover, but the researchers note that it may not be as full a recovery as their data suggests, with previous research showing differences in the preseason scans between athletes in contact sports and athletes in noncontact sports.
They also point out that other research shows the brain recovery doesn’t start immediately after the season ends – kids can’t finish up the football season and then jump right into another contact sport if they want their brains to fix themselves.
It’s also pretty upsetting that this shows evidence that we have a million kids who are spending several months of the school year with damaged brain connectivity, and none of them show any outward warning signs. Again, this isn’t from diagnosed concussions, but the everyday jarring head movements that inevitably happen when playing a contact sport.
The study itself has a number of limitations: most importantly in my opinion, there wasn’t a real control. Yes, they did scan the brains of a handful of non-contact sport athletes, but they only did pre and post season scans. They found them to be similar, but technically the same was true of the football players, so we don’t know for sure that the other athletes didn’t also have dissimilar scans while the season was ongoing.
The other issue is fMRI scans themselves. I’m not saying to never trust studies that use them: fMRIs are super important and have told researchers a LOT about how our brains work. They are, though, notoriously easy to screw up. Never forget the scientific heroes who put a dead salmon in an fMRI and found they could get the data to show activation in its brain stem. It’s just always keeping in mind that fMRIs can be very imprecise, they can be affected by differences in “blood pressure, heart rate, diet, and time of day” so it’s important to control for those things, and they offer loads of noisy data that can be evaluated in different ways.
So keep all THAT in mind as we turn to the second study, published last week in the Journal of the American Medical Association: “Cerebral Cortical Surface Structure and Neural Activation Pattern Among Adolescent Football Players.” This is another fMRI study of the brains of high school football players. These researchers looked at the brains of 205 teenage football players and 70 teenage boys in non-contact sports like swimming and running, and they looked for differences in a number of areas related to mental health. Previous studies have found that older athletes in contact sports do have differences in these areas, along with mental health issues, but it was generally thought that this damage was the result of years and years of continued trauma.
Unfortunately, this new study suggests that that’s not true, because they did find that even teenagers playing football had the same kind of damage: in two scans one year apart, both done in between seasons, football players showed “cortical thinning and changes in brain folding…lower brain signaling and coherence in frontal and medial parts of the brain, but increased signaling and coherence…in the occipital lobe.” That increase is in areas associated with visual memory and attention, and you might think “increase” must be good but the authors point out that this mirrors previous research that found the same signaling in patients with mild traumatic brain injury, and it was significantly associated with clinical cognitive dysfunction.
So yeah, super not good everybody! And these are just the latest two studies. The evidence is becoming completely overwhelming that contact sports are damaging children’s brains in very serious and potentially permanent ways. Have you ever played that game with your friends where you try to think of things that our society currently sees as perfectly fine but in the future will be seen as monstrous or even illegal? For me, looking at this growing body of research, it’s gotta be contact sports for children and teens. Mark my words: future generations are going to look back and ask us “Why did you not just tolerate but celebrate this obvious child abuse?” And hopefully we still have enough brain cells left working to tell them: sorry, we were too busy stopping trans people from getting medical care.
