Jeffrey Kluger Quotes

You're not going to eliminate concussions. Anytime you hit your head, you have a chance of getting a concussion, in any sport, too. I think we have to learn more about it. Part of it is rules, part of it is equipment, part of it is medical studies, knowing more about the brain.

I'm learning how to prevent my brain from getting worse than it is after suffering a career worth of concussions playing football.

At some point, we're going to have to get to the point where, before you play football, I'm going to test you at some stage in your life to determine if you're susceptible to concussions. We need a test that shows us that your brain is situated a certain way that puts you at risk. If you are susceptible, don't play football.

The brain is suspended in a kind of thick jelly inside the skull, and a helmet can't keep it from sloshing around. If you hit your head hard enough, the brain goes bashing against the walls of the skull.

Football has always been violent. In the early days of the game, they didn't wear hard helmets. They wore soft helmets, which were just designed to protect the ears. In the '40s and '50s they began to introduce hard helmets, which provided much more protection against things like skull fractures.

The brain sits snugly inside the skull, but it's not a completely flush fit - there is still a layer of fluid between bone and soft tissue that serves as a natural shock absorber. Some shocks, however, can't be absorbed, and when the head gets clobbered too hard, the brain can twist or torque or rattle around inside its skeletal casing.

He [Gerald R. Ford] played too much football with his helmet off.

Boxing is a great example of it, but in football, sometimes you're taking greater hits than boxers. When you have one man going full speed against another man, and those heads are colliding, it's just the fact of science you're going to have results.

The only way you're gonna eliminate helmet-to-helmet contact is to take the helmets off. Go back to leather helmets. I mean, I think a defensive player would be much less inclined to lead with his head if he had no protection.

I've had knee trouble, and I worry about my shoulder, but I think my weakest link is my head. A helmet can only do so much, and I have seen the effects of brain injuries. That is a big fear. I think everyone's weakest link is their brain because it's their most fragile link.

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?

Yeah, I mean there's points in every game where you get a hit and you feel a little woozy. Not every game, but mostly every game you hit someone and you're like, 'Whoa, that was a good one.'

It makes common sense that children, whose brains are rapidly developing, should not be hitting their heads hundreds of times per season.

For some reason, I have a thick skull.

I, for one, refuse to box without headgear as an amateur. With the rising awareness of concussions and head injury, it is becoming more evident that we need to protect our brains as much as possible. There hasn't been enough research to conclude that it is safer to box without the use of headgear.

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.

My son was a goalkeeper in soccer, and he luckily never had much head trauma. He never had any concussions or anything. I really wanted him to play football, but now I'm thankful he didn't.

I've had hundreds and hundreds of concussions, but I don't think that I have any permanent damage. A lot of my peers do.

I want to leave this sport with a little bit of my brains left.

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

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.

I've been wrestling since I was 18 years old. And within the first five months of my wrestling career, I'd already had three concussions. And for years after that, I would get a concussion here and there, and it gets to the point that when you've been wrestling for 16 years, that adds up to a lot of concussions.

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

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