Boston University CTE Center and Brain Bank

Of course.

I just want to quiz Chris on who was the first person to sign up for the BU Brain Bank back in 30, 20 years ago? Who was that? Do you know who that guy was?

You know, there's a debate and a long, funny story.

If it was you or it was Isaac, it was me.

And there's another number worth discussing.

The Boston University CTE Center has diagnosed CTE in 345 of 376 deceased former NFL players who donated their brains.

Even accounting for the donation bias, that is a staggering number and is the reason this conversation cannot be limited to American football.

So let's do this sport by sport picture.

So to understand why there's a range, it's helpful to understand how we got to these numbers.

And so when we looked at the individuals who had CTE, who played in the NFL across three brain banks, mostly the BU CTE Center, but also the Mount Sinai Brain Bank and the UCSF Alzheimer's Disease Center Brain Bank.

When we combined all NFL players across these brain banks, we found that NFL players had a ninety-three percent prevalence of CTE at death.

But that ninety-three percent represents a selected cohort.

Thank you for going through that.

Because of some of the wording that you've used, I wanna make sure people understand, um, a very, very important distinction, that we at the BU CTE Center aren't really concussion experts.

I make it very clear that I have never been, and not now, a concussion expert, and our research really doesn't focus on concussion.

What we really look at is the neurodegenerative disease of chronic traumatic encephalopathy, which-