THINGS NEED TO KNOW ABOUT CONCUSSION MOVIE
Recent release
“Concussion” is the rare movie that agitates scientists and sports lovers
alike.
The Sony Pictures Entertainment 6758, +0.58% movie follows protagonist Will Smith
as he discovers a degenerative brain disease in a former National Football
League player on his autopsy table.
Smith’s character,
the Nigerian-born doctor Bennet Omalu, then must battle the powerful football
league to share his findings with the public.
For sports lovers, the Christmas Day film from writer-director Peter Landesman,
based on a true story, has troubling implications for a major U.S. sport.
But many of the
half-dozen concussion experts interviewed by MarketWatch for this article were
dismayed by the movie’s science — and concerned that viewers could walk away
with inaccurate, and even damaging, information.
Here are six points
about “Concussion” courtesy of concussion experts, not Hollywood:
‘Concussion’ isn’t about
concussions
You might not have
bought a movie ticket for “Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy,” but that is the
actual syndrome at the heart of the movie: a brain disease found in patients
with a history of repetitive hits to the head.
Yes, CTE is connected
to concussions. But scientists don’t yet know the exact nature of the
relationship between the two.
Dr. Omalu didn’t discover, or
name, CTE
Scientists have
known about this pattern of abnormal brain cells since the 1920s, when it was
discovered in boxers, according to Dr. William Barr, director of
neuropsychology at NYU Langone Medical Center.
The term CTE has
also been used for decades.
Omalu’s discovery of
the link with football was “significant,” though “he’s not the one who
discovered the disease,” Barr said.
Even experts don’t know what
turns concussion into CTE
Years of exposure to
trauma to the head do appear to correlate with a CTE diagnosis, said Dr.
Jamshid Ghajar, a neurosurgery professor at Stanford School of Medicine and
president of the Brain Trauma Foundation. But there is no causal relationship
between the severity of a concussion or number of concussions and CTE, he said.
“We know many, many
kids hit their heads playing sports. Why do some kids develop problems, and
some don’t?” asked Dr. Mark Herceg, director of neuropsychology for the
brain-injury unit at Burke Rehabilitation Hospital in White Plains, N.Y.
“That’s the Holy Grail in all of this.”
CTE has even been
identified in nonconcussed brains, and many retired football players don’t seem
to suffer from it, said Dr. Rosemarie Scolaro Moser, a neuropsychologist and
the director of the Sports Concussion Center of New Jersey.
And there is even more
concussion experts don’t know
“No one talks in the medical community about
how much we don’t know,” said Jessica Schwartz, a spokeswoman for the American
Physical Therapy Association.
There isn’t even a
consensus on what a concussion is, said Ghajar.
In the broadest
definition, concussions can come from even minor-seeming hits.
This doesn’t mean the end of
youth sports.
All six concussion
experts interviewed said we need to find better ways to keep child athletes
safe—not end Little League.
Moser said she’s
recently seen many high-school athlete patients come in, worried about getting
CTE to the point that it’s made them anxious, depressed and panicked. “That’s a
side effect of the movie we have to be vigilant about.”
“These athletes have
had tens of thousands of hits and jolts to the head,” Moser said. “Your normal
high-school kid hasn’t had anywhere near as many.”
Ghajar agreed: “We
all like sports. Sports aren’t going away.”
Instead, it’s about
“preventing and detecting properly, and then having therapy.”
Having a concussion won’t
destroy your life.
Omalu only
discovered the connection between CTE and football when doing an autopsy on
former Pittsburgh Steelers player Mike Webster.
That, paired with
high-profile football players’ suicides, means “kids all over the country ...
think a concussion is a death sentence,” said Brooke de Lench, executive
director of MomsTEAM Youth Sports Safety Institute.
But “bad brain cells
don’t drive you to drink antifreeze or commit suicide,” Barr said. The movie is
“acting like the pathology in the brain is what made them commit suicide.
That’s silly. Suicide is a very complex human behavioral process.”
In fact, NFL players appear to be at lower
risk for suicide than other men, according to some research.
Still, the functions
a concussion impairs—cognition, thought, mood, balance and more—certainly make
life more difficult, even “scary,” Schwartz said.
Getting a concussion
is hardly good for your brain, of course. But having a concussion doesn’t lead
straight to Omalu’s autopsy table.
0 comments:
Post a Comment