Think about that for a moment. These were players whose brains showed evidence of injury and who were experiencing problems with cognitive functioning, yet many of them improved. It doesn't mean that every brain injury can be reversed or that everyone will experience the same results, but it does challenge the idea that once the brain has been injured, there's nothing we can do.
Welcome to RenewHer, a podcast for women over 50 ready to reignite their energy and explore what's next. I'm Genell Lemley, brain fitness coach. Here, you'll hear real stories from women taking on new challenges after 50, along with brain health tips to boost focus, energy, and the mindset to move forward with confidence.
Let's dive into today's episode.
Hey there, and welcome back to RenewHer. It's football season. I love football. I was, and still am, a Minnesota Vikings fan. I grew up watching football every Sunday. It was a family affair. Sometimes a couple of us would be upstairs watching the game, the other two would be downstairs, and when something great happened, we'd stomp on the floor and cheer.
I grew up during the era of what was called the Purple People Eaters. And Fran Tarkenton, he was our quarterback. He was known as The Scrambler. I was such a fan that my eighth-grade speech was about Fran Tarkenton. And I still remember how I ended that speech. Like all great quarterbacks, Fran Tarkenton will never die, he'll just fade back and pass away. Pretty clever for an eighth-grader, don't you think? Ha.
I've also had my heart broken by the Vikings more times than I care to count. If you're a Vikings fan, you know exactly what I'm talking about. And there's another piece of my family's football history. My late husband's family bought Vikings season tickets in 1967. I still have those tickets today. Next year, that will be sixty years.
Football has been part of my life for as long as I can remember. I loved watching the plays unfold. The tackles. The big plays. The excitement. But back then, I never thought about what might be happening inside those players' brains. I knew football was a physical sport. I knew players got hurt, but I didn't understand the potential consequences of all those hits to the head.
And now, as a brain health coach, I look at the game differently. I still love football. I still cheer for the Vikings. But I find myself thinking about the players and what their lives might look like ten, twenty, or thirty years after they've left the field.
Because we're learning that the consequences of repeated head impacts can extend far beyond a player's football career. And a major study published just last month in August has brought new attention to those concerns.
Today, I want to explore what happens to the brain when it experiences repeated physical trauma. What researchers are discovering about a disease called CTE. And what Dr. Daniel Amen's research involving former NFL players tells us about the potential for improving cognitive function after brain injury. I also want to talk about something that matters to every one of us, the importance of protecting our brains, because whether you've played football, experienced a concussion, or never stepped onto an athletic field, your brain is worth protecting. And the more we understand about it, the better equipped we are to make informed decisions about our brain health.
Let's start with something that might surprise you. Your brain is incredibly soft. Think of the consistency of soft butter. And while we tend to imagine the inside of our skull as a perfectly smooth protective shell, it isn't. There are bony ridges and irregularities, particularly around the base of the skull. Your brain is cushioned by fluid and surrounded by protective membranes. But when your head experiences a sudden blow or violent movement, your brain can move and deform inside your skull. It can be bruised by contact with the skull, and the rapid movement itself can stretch and strain delicate brain tissue.
That's why a concussion doesn't require a direct blow to the head. A sudden jolt to the body can also cause the brain to accelerate or rotate enough to produce an injury. A concussion is a type of traumatic brain injury, and you don't have to lose consciousness to have one. Someone might feel dizzy or confused. They might develop a headache, experience nausea, or have trouble remembering what happened. Some symptoms appear immediately, others may develop later. Many people recover from a concussion, but recovery varies. Some experience symptoms that persist for weeks, months, or longer.
Now, think about a football player. A quarterback might experience multiple concussions throughout his career, but what about the linemen? They're involved in repeated collisions throughout a game, and many of those impacts may not result in a diagnosed concussion. Researchers call these repetitive head impacts.
Some are described as sub-concussive impacts because they don't produce recognizable concussion symptoms. Think about what that exposure might look like over an entire career. Practice after practice. Game after game. Season after season. For some players, it begins in childhood and continues through high school, college, and professional football.
Researchers are investigating what that cumulative exposure means for long-term brain health. One of the diseases researchers have linked to repeated head impacts is called CTE, or chronic traumatic encephalopathy. CTE is a progressive brain disease that has been found in some people with a history of repeated blows to the head, including former football players.
One of the hallmarks of CTE is an abnormal buildup of a protein called tau in the brain. Over time, the disease can damage brain cells and affect how the brain functions. People with CTE may experience problems with memory and thinking, as well as changes in mood or behavior. In more advanced cases, CTE can be associated with dementia. But here's something that's important to understand. Not everyone who plays football develops CTE. And having memory problems after playing football doesn't mean someone has CTE.
In fact, right now, CTE can only be definitively diagnosed by examining the brain after death. That's one of the reasons this disease is so difficult to study. Researchers can't simply test thousands of living former football players and determine who does and doesn't have CTE.
Instead, much of what we've learned has been from studying the brains of former athletes after they've died, and that brings us to a major study published just last month. On August 25th, 2026, researchers published a major study in the medical journal, the BMJ. They wanted to understand how common CTE might be among former NFL players who had died.
They identified one thousand seven hundred and twelve former NFL players who died between 2008 and 2021. Of those, three hundred and thirty-eight had donated their brains for examination. And here's what they found. CTE was identified in three hundred fifteen of those three hundred and thirty-eight donated brains. That's approximately ninety-three percent.
Now, before we go any further, we need to understand what that number means. It does not mean that ninety-three percent of all NFL players have CTE. Brain donation isn't random. Families may be more likely to donate a loved one's brain when they've noticed cognitive or behavioral problems. That can influence results. So the researchers looked at the broader population of former NFL players who had died. And for the years twenty sixteen through twenty twenty one, they calculated that at least twenty-four point five percent had CTE at death.
That's approximately one in four, and it's a minimum estimate. The researchers couldn't determine whether players whose brains weren't examined also had CTE, so the true percentage among that group of deceased players remains uncertain. This finding does not tell us a percentage of living NFL players who have CTE, as it's not possible to diagnose until after death. And it doesn't mean that one in four players experienced cognitive impairment. Those are different questions.
But the study provides additional evidence that CTE is a substantial concern among former professional football players. And the researchers discovered something else. Among the players whose brains were donated, the most advanced stage of CTE was associated with the higher risk of dementia. That connection is particularly important because researchers have long been trying to understand how the physical changes seen in CTE relate to the cognitive difficulties that some former players experience during life.
This study adds to that understanding, but it doesn't mean every player will develop CTE. And it doesn't mean every person with CTE will develop dementia. There is still so much we don't know, including why some people appear to be more vulnerable than others, and what factors might influence the development or progression of the disease.
As I read this research, I couldn't help thinking about those players I watched growing up, the men who made football so exciting. What did all those years of repeated impacts mean for their brains? We can't go back and prevent the hits they already experienced, but that raises another question. What about the players who have already experienced years of repeated head trauma?
Is there anything that can be done to help improve how their brains are functioning? That's a question Dr. Daniel Amen and his colleagues began exploring nearly two decades ago. And that story begins in 2007 with a former football player named Anthony Davis.
Davis went to see Dr. Amen because he was experiencing cognitive problems and was concerned about what he was seeing in other retired football players. When Dr. Amen scanned his brain, he saw evidence of significant brain trauma. Amen later described the scan by saying that at fifty-four, Davis's brain looked more like that of an eighty-five-year-old.
That meeting became the impetus for a much larger effort to study brain injury and brain rehabilitation in professional football players. Dr. Amen and his colleagues went on to study hundreds of active and retired NFL players.
The researchers used several assessment methods, including cognitive testing and a type of brain imaging called SPECT. SPECT measures patterns of blood flow in the brain. Compared with the healthy comparison group, the players showed reduced blood flow in several regions. They also performed more poorly on many cognitive measures. In other words, researchers were seeing evidence that years of playing football may have affected how these players' brains were functioning and how they were performing cognitively.
But here's the part I find particularly interesting. They didn't stop at identifying the problems. They wanted to know whether some of that functioning could improve. Players participated in a brain rehabilitation program that addressed multiple aspects of brain health, including nutrition, exercise, sleep, limiting alcohol, avoiding smoking and drug use, weight management when appropriate, and nutritional supplements. And they saw improvement.
In the book, Change Your Brain, Change Your Life, Dr. Amen wrote that by that point, they had scanned and treated more than two hundred active and retired professional football players, and that 80% showed significant improvement on their SPECT scans and neuropsychological testing.
Think about that for a moment. These were players whose brains showed evidence of injury and who were experiencing problems with cognitive functioning, yet many of them improved. It doesn't mean that every brain injury can be reversed or that everyone will experience the same results. But it does challenge the idea that once the brain has been injured, there's nothing we can do.
And that's what I find so hopeful about this research. Our brains have an incredible capacity to adapt and change. And what we do matters. How we eat, how we move, how we sleep, what we expose our brains to. And perhaps most importantly in the context of today's conversation, how we protect them in the first place.
And when it comes to football, we know a lot more about protecting the brain today than we did when I was growing up watching Fran Tarkenton scramble around the field. One of the biggest changes has been how we recognize and respond to concussions. The NFL has developed protocols intended to identify players who may have sustained a concussion, evaluate them, and determine when they can safely return to participation.
The league's concussion protocol was developed in 2011 by its Head, Neck, and Spine Committee, which included independent and league-affiliated medical experts and advisors associated with the NFL Players Association. The protocol has been revised over time. A player diagnosed with a concussion must complete a graduated return to participation process and receive clearance from an independent neurological consultant before returning to full participation. That's an important development.
But there's a distinction I want you to understand. A concussion protocol is designed to help identify and manage concussions. It doesn't eliminate the repeated head impacts that occur during football, and it doesn't establish that a player is protected from CTE. Those are different challenges. A player might never experience a diagnosed A player might never experience a diagnosed concussion and still accumulate years of repetitive head impacts.
That's one reason researchers are continuing to investigate exposure over an athlete's entire playing career. The goal isn't simply to recognize an injury after it happens. It's also to understand how to reduce the risk of injury in the first place.
When I think back to those Sunday afternoons watching the Vikings as a kid, I realize how differently I see the game today. Back then, I never thought about what those repeated hits might mean for the players years or even decades later.
Now I know more about what those impacts can do to the brain, and I can't help thinking about it. That doesn't mean I've stopped loving football. I'll still be cheering for the Vikings. I'll still get excited about a great play. And I'll probably still experience a little heartbreak along the way. But I watch the game differently now, and I think that's what learning more about the brain can do.
It changes what we notice and what we think about. The research doesn't give us all the answers, but it gives us important reasons to keep asking questions. And it reminds us that protecting the brain isn't something we should think about only after an injury occurs. It's something worth considering throughout our lives because our brains make so much of what's possible in our lives possible. And they're worth protecting.
Thanks for joining me today. Until next time, stay energized and keep embracing what's possible.
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