Jeanne Marie Laskas Quotes

What I did when I identified Mike Webster's thing, I showed it to other doctors. We all agreed that this was something new, but we had to give it a name. This was not dementia pugilistica. Maybe we could have called it dementia footballitica!

On a foggy, steel gray Saturday in September 2002, Bennet Omalu arrived at the Allegheny County coroner's office and got his assignment for the day: Perform an autopsy on the body of Mike Webster, a professional football player.

We've now found CTE in former NFL players who played every position except kicker.

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

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.

It's just a matter of sometimes the CTE in your brain affects what happens in your life... and sometimes... it does not.

We're hoping that there is large-scale recognition that CTE is a risk when playing football.

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

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.

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

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

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.

All the NFL players I have examined pathologically, I have not seen one that did not have changes in their brain system with brain damage.

It's the subconcussive hits, the constant bam, bam, bam that linemen like Suh give and receive. Those are the hits scientists say cause the lasting damage to the brain, the kind of injuries that made guys like Mike Webster, Terry Long, and so many others go crazy. The subconcussive hits - every single play.

A child who plays a game of football for one season without any documented concussion - several months after that season, if you subject his brain to sophisticated psychological testing and radiological testing, functional MRIs, there is evidence of brain damage.

When I read Mike Webster's file before I began his autopsy, I knew he was more than a 50-year-old heart attack victim. His file and the television reports of the death of the former Pittsburgh Steelers center described a long, steep fall into bizarre behavior. I suspected he suffered from some sort of brain disorder.

When people say that you kind of just get - you know, just feel like a little buzzed or dazed or had your bell rung - they consider that a concussion. I wouldn't. But if that is considered a concussion, I would say any football player at least records 50 to 100 in the course of a year.

The families of many athletes - incensed at the sports leagues and hoping to make games safer overall - are increasingly making the brains of players who die prematurely and suspiciously available for study. Some athletes are even making the bequest themselves.

[Referring to Jack Kemp:] … a football player who has played too much without his helmet.

I'm trying to do some things with my brain institute to understand more about the impact of concussion on brain tissue, because we have some scientists over there who are really good at looking at brain tissue and the effects of things on brain tissue.

We, as a league, we have not in any way changed our desire to do everything we can to make it safe, make it safe as to head injury. We hope and will support any data that would give us more insight into any short- and long-term consequences. We would support that.

The relationship between concussions and the asserted clinical symptoms of C.T.E. remains unknown.

I want Alzheimer's. I want Lou Gehrig's disease. I want Parkinson's. I want Huntington's. I want to be the face and voice of all these neurological traumas. I want them all.

Chronic means long term. Traumatic means associated with trauma. Encephalopathy means a bad brain.