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THE warning in The Journal of the American Medical Association is not ambiguous: “There is a very definite brain injury due to single or repeated blows on the head or jaw which cause multiple concussion hemorrhages. … The condition can no longer be ignored by the medical profession or the public.”
The report in question concerns professional athletes, hardly surprising given the worries expressed during this week’s Super Bowl runup and Congressional hearings into long-term damage caused by football-related concussions. It methodically details the well-publicized problems — loss of coordination, cognitive deficits, uncontrollable rages — that forced the N.F.L. to issue new rules this season limiting players with head injuries from returning to the field.
But what really makes the research and its conclusions so interesting is its timing: it appeared in The Journal of the American Medical Association on Oct. 13, 1928. This raises the question — at least for me — as to why we are announcing the athlete concussion-dementia link as a new, and still somewhat debatable, issue some 80 years later.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/05/opinion/05blum.html?scp=1&sq=deborah%20blum&st=cse