For hockey fans, it’s the best time of the year — the start of the Stanley Cup playoffs. But the physical aspect of playing the game has led to increased concerns about potential links between hockey and chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE). National Hockey League (NHL) Commissioner Gary Bettman says he remains unconvinced that there are any connections between the degenerative brain disease and playing NHL hockey.
“We listen to the medical opinions on CTE, and I don’t believe there has been any documented study that suggests that elements of our game result in CTE. There have been isolated cases of players who have played the game [who] have had CTE. But it doesn’t mean that it necessarily came from playing in the NHL,” Bettman told NPR’s A Martinez on Morning Edition.
Preliminary findings of a study conducted by Boston University (BU) appear to contradict Bettman’s assertion. Researchers found that each additional year of playing hockey may increase a person’s chance of developing CTE by about 23%.
“In football, we’ve shown this really robust relationship between years of football play and risk for CTE. We wanted to take the same approach for hockey and our numbers are now such that we can start to make estimates about the relationship between years of hockey play and risk for CTE,” Jesse Mez, associate professor of neurology at the BU School of Medicine and a BU CTE Center investigator, tells NPR.
The study looked at the brains of 74 people, ranging in age from 13 to 91, who played hockey at various levels from youth hockey to professional sport. Nearly half of the individuals, 46%, also participated in other contact sports such as…
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