Bennet Omalu Quotes

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

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?

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

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

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

I had one major concussion. It's different for each guy. For me, it was never an issue because I didn't have an issue with concussions.

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.

The beginnings of CTE can start quite early.

Dementia is, after all, a symptom of organic brain damage. It is a condition, a disorder of the central nervous system, brought about in my case by a viral assault on brain tissue. When the assault wiped out certain intellectual processes, it also affected emotional processes.

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

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

Over the course of my 13-year career, I've had a lot of concussions, and yet, because I'm no longer competing or suffering from concussion symptoms, I felt like I was in the clear. The reality, though, is that I get concussions far more easily, and my symptoms last far longer than ever before.

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

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.

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

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

One thing that's important to understand is that it's believed that the pathology of CTE doesn't have to do with concussion so much as it has to do with the accumulation of sub-concussive hits. So every hit matters. If you're subject to 800 or 1,200 of these every year, it accumulates. It's like erosion.

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.

Luckily, I'm only aware of about two or three concussions that I have had, but there's really no way of telling how many overall.

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.'

A lot of people don't realize how severe a concussion injury is. You have to listen to the doctors. You have to be really careful about them.

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.

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.

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.