Ann McKee

When you go back through 40 years, the toughest year to write about or chapter in the book was what?

I would say the toughest year would have been the year that I wrote about Ann McKee, who I think is the conscience of the NFL.

She's the big CTE doctor who, when in 2010, when James Harrison was, uh, uh, being, uh, uh, quite a violent player in the game and the NFL was starting to come down on teams, I went to visit Ann McKee in her office in Baltimore, and she showed me Lou Creekmur's brain tissue.

Um, he was, died severely demented.

Um, and she was in the process of finding out how many people who, you know, had CTE, um, you know, w- when they, when they died and, and obviously, uh, y- you know, you can only diagnose that post-death.

In this study, for example, career length predicted how severe CTE was, but not whether it was actually present.

Back a few years ago, we had the opportunity to interview Anne McKee, one of your co-authors on this study, on the same topic.

And one of the major takeaways, at least at that time, was that duration of career did predict CTE presence in those studies.

How should we think about these newer data in that context of those prior studies?

So I got my PhD in mouse models in Alzheimer's pathology, so just looking at different facets of it.

And when I was trying to find the next step, the position in Boston University opened with Dr. Ann McKee for, for a postdoc role.

And as somebody who has had my fair share of head injuries and concussions, that seemed like a really interesting step to take my work and be more translational about it.

So get out of mouse models and start to look at human biology.

So what goes on at that center? I mean, is there a big brain collection and people are looking at brains? What's it all about?

Yeah.

So the center was started in, in the late 2000s by Dr. Ann McKee and, and several other collaborators, uh, who came together and wanted to better understand what CTE looked like.

So like I said, even though this is almost 100 years old, we are maybe in, like, the adolescence right now-

And he and Dr. Cantu were looking for a research center to collaborate with in some way.

[lips smack] To make a longer story shorter, but even though it's already too long, we then, after around a year or so, created a formal affiliation between Sports Legacy Institute and Boston University, where my amazing colleague, Dr. Ann McKee, and I were the co-founders and leaders at BU, and Dr. Cantu and Chris Nowinski were the co-founders and leaders from Sports Legacy Institute.

And we created this Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy, which changed names to the Boston University CTE Center.

Chris went on to get his PhD in neuroscience, behavioral neuroscience, and we've had an incredible relationship together through the years.

... think it tells listeners that things just don't happen.

Yeah.

I think it's great to, well, lack of better term, peek behind the curtain, and actually learn the history of how such an iconic organization with workers, and staff, and people such as yourself, and Dr. Nowinski, and Dr. Ann McKee, and Dr. Cantu actually came together.

Because as soon as you mention concussion, concussion research, everyone now just thinks Boston University Concussion Center and concussion research.

And that is published research that is... peer-reviewed by large data sets and experts.

Just in a brief glance, there was the original publication in neurology, and this has been the Boston University well-known chronic traumatic encephalopathy center with Dr. Ann McKee.

Harvard Medical School, Mass General, they have all looked at these studies and looked at the information.

And there is a believed to be a minimum of a fourfold increase in risk for ALS because one plays football.