Jeanne Marie Laskas Quotes

I have a lot of college football players in my Brain Bank with CTE.

As the National Football League and other pro sports increasingly reckon with the early dementia, mental health issues, suicides and even criminal behavior of former players, the risk of what's known as chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), is becoming clear.

Certainly, our work has identified CTE in many professional football players, but we're also seeing it in a very high percentage of college players.

While we know, on average, that certain positions experience more repetitive head impacts and are more likely at greater risk for CTE, no position is immune.

As a physician, I'm somewhat an advocate of patients. How come, before Mike Webster, no NFL player was told or knew that there was an intrinsic risk of brain damage from playing football?

Subconcussive injuries are brain injuries on top of unrecovered brain injuries.

There are the medical dangers of football in general caused by head trauma over repetitive hits.

You look at guys with significant Alzheimer's and dementia and the mood swings and the suicides that unfortunately NFL players have been faced with. And depression. Lou Gehrig's disease. These are all things that have kind of been linked to the brain damage from football.

It's impossible for me to dissociate the risk of playing football from the risk of C.T.E.

I know if I don't look after myself, I will be talking to you in a couple of years' time mumbling my words and slurring. It won't be because I am drunk: it will be the fighting, taking blow after blow to the brain. That scares me. I don't worry about being killed in the ring; it's losing my mind that I fear.

My father was an NFL running back, so I feel like I might be more susceptible, genetically, to CTE.

My brain is - essentially, you take any college football player in the country, because I have had multiple, multiple concussions. I had 10 documented concussions, four post-concussion seizures and so, but, with that said, my brain is no worse than your average college football player's brain, right?

CTE can be caused by smaller hits to the head over time.

Is a concussion going to lead to CTE? No, probably not in most cases. But if you have enough concussions over a certain amount of time, yes, then I think you can lead to CTE.

Yes, the concept that blunt-force trauma of the head causes brain damage is a generally accepted principle of medicine. That is why I was so appalled by the NFL doctors who were denying my work.

The overwhelming evidence is that trauma is a major factor in CTE.

If chronic bashing of the head could destroy a boxer's brain, couldn't it also destroy a football player's brain? Surely someone in the history of football had thought to look for dementia pugilistica. Unlike boxers, football players wear helmets, but a helmet can't fully protect the head from damaging impact.

I would bet you that even though people think I absorbed an inordinate number of head injuries, I'd say relative to the number of guys who have played this game, I would say that my head injuries were relatively small.

The beginnings of CTE can start quite early.

Omalu first found the tau 'threads' in the brain of former Steeler Mike Webster in 2002 and published his findings in 2005, in the journal 'Neurosurgery.'

Dementia pugilistica was discovered in 1928... And we still have boxing. Football will continue.

It would be ill-advised to compare war and a sport, but I don't think the brain knows the difference. With post-traumatic stress and traumatic brain injuries in blasts with veterans, we see a very similar and somewhat unique issue with repetitive brain injuries in football.

Dave Duerson had classic pathology of CTE and no evidence of any other disease.

More and more NFL players have been willing their bodies to science so that their brains can be studied even if they die of other causes.

I know how much my late center Mike Webster suffered. I can only imagine what a lot of defensive players from my era are going through.