Concussion in sport: CTE found in more than half of sportspeople who donated brains

Groundbreaking research into the long-term ramifications of concussion in sport has found chronic traumatic encephalopathy in the brains of more than half of a cohort of donors, including three under the age of 35.

The Australian Sports Brain Bank on Monday reported its preliminary findings after examining the 21 brains posthumously donated by sportspeople since the centre’s inception in 2018.

Of those – all of whom had played sports with risks of repetitive head injury, including 17 in football codes – 12 donors were found to have CTE lesions, while all but one exhibited some form of neurodegeneration.

CTE, which can only be definitively diagnosed at autopsy, is a neurodegenerative condition linked to repeated head traumas. Symptoms experienced during life include cognitive impairment, impulsive behaviour, depression, suicidal thoughts, short-term memory loss and emotional instability.

Among the group with CTE are the already-reported cases of high-profile Australian rules footballers Danny Frawley, Shane Tuck and Polly Farmer, along with two anonymous former professional rugby league players. Both Frawley and Tuck took their own lives, while Farmer had Alzheimer’s – another condition linked to head injuries.

But the additional findings made by Associate Professor Michael Buckland, a neuropathologist at the Royal Prince Alfred hospital and the University of Sydney, and his brain bank colleagues, underlined the prevalence and severity of traumatic brain injury across all age groups and levels of collision-based sport.

“CTE was identified in the brains of older former professionals with long playing careers, but also in younger, nonprofessional sportsmen and in recent professionals who had played under modern concussion