Not every single person with CTE dies horribly. As I understand it, some simply live decades happily forgetting their children's names and what day of the week it is.
This is currently happening to my grandfather. He played football most of his life and up through adulthood for the Philadelphia Eagles before leaving the sport to pursue his passion for flying (eventually becoming a captain for Delta).
He's had a charmed life. Lots of great experiences, like a real-life Tom Sawyer or Huck Finn, and the stories to go along with them.
Now's he battling (and losing) with the late-stage effects of dozens of concussions, which is manifesting itself as severe short-term memory loss, increasingly poor long-term recall, and eventually the inevitable situation where he doesn't recognize his own children, only grandchild, and only great grandchild. My father also played football most of his life (but not at the same level), and I'm concerned the same thing will eventually happen to him.
I'm very thankful to have had my grandfather in my life for so long (I'm now 37), and I have so many really wonderful memories and experiences that I can attribute to him (sitting in the cockpit of a 727 as a toddler, flying in the family little Piper Cub, countless lovely tailgate parties, a huge loving extended family of his long-time friends, etc), and I want to make sure that in the short window that's left where he's able to be at-least present in the moment that myself and my young son spend ample time with him.
It's difficult to watch the decline, but I can't imagine how difficult it must be for him to be living it.
I'm basically your age and my grandmother passed away from Alzheimers almost 10 years ago. It was another 5 before that when she last recognized anyone in our family. She neither played football nor had any history of concussion that any of us are aware of.
The point being, from what I've seen on the subject, there's no way to diagnose CTE until the patient has passed away and you can slice open their brain. It's possible that your grandfather's symptoms are related to his concussions, but it's also very possible that it would have happened anyways. CTE usually manifests 8-10 years after these brain injuries and has a lot of symptoms beyond the dementia you list, so it could be garden-variety Alzheimers.
Regardless, you have my sympathies. Alzheimers-type dementia is truly a terrible way to lose a loved one. The anti-climactic nature of it makes it really difficult to get closure in the way that you do when someone's death is more abrupt. Instead, they slowly fade away in the "boiled frog" fashion and you're left at whatever funeral you end up having realizing that they died a long time before their body expired and you never got to grieve. Be sure that you're intentional in remembering the person he used to be and don't let the empty shell of a person that exists now replace that in your memory. I didn't do that enough and it made grieving for my grandmother very difficult.
If there's a silver lining to my story, my mother is now past the age when her mother was diagnosed with Alzheimers and is, thus far, not showing signs of the disease. Given some of the research that's tying Alzheimers to particulate air pollution, I'm hopeful that the strides made by the EPA and others in reducing our air pollution will mean that she won't have to go through that ordeal and I won't have to lose her the way I lost my grandmother. If your dad is more than a decade past his football-playing days and symptoms haven't shown up, there's a good chance that he won't either.
In my opinion, the most horrible death is the one where someone else starts living in your body, and no one is even aware that you have gone.
Senile dementia, Alzheimers, brain cancers, and TBI frighten me even more than being flung 100m across the pavement in an automobile accident, or getting dragged into the gap by a commuter train. With those, you know you're dead, and so does everyone else. When you slowly lose your mind, no one can ever really be sure when you stopped being you, not even yourself.
Is that really best-case scenario? So you're saying that among the retired football players who do TV today, Terry Bradshaw, Howie Long, Michael Strahan, Cris Collinsworth, etc. 90% of these players have CTE and will have decades-long dementia? So for the older players we should start seeing that very soon, no?
The article implies a selection bias -- that the actual number of football players with CTE could be as low as 9%. It also notes cases where CTE effects really become "horrible" much later in life, for men who are older than the guys you list.
Guys who self-select to be television personalities also might have a lower incidence of CTE. There's also a chance that some odd behavior on TV will be interpreted as "quirky" or "goofy" and not "experiencing brain damage."
At any rate... Of course the answer is: No, not everyone with CTE dies "horribly." But it's seeming increasingly likely that CTE can have major unexpected consequences on the later lives of football players. And the worst case scenario of CTE (Junior Seau, Jovan Belcher) is exceptionally horrible and exceptionally tragic.
Thanks for the reply. This is what I'm trying to understand myself. I didn't see the 9% number in the article. I did see the mention about selection bias. So I wonder what the true numbers are here. If it's 9% then that explains well enough why so many ex-players don't show strong signs of CTE (by strong I mean long-term memory loss or worse).
The 9% is assuming that 100% of unknown cases are in fact negative.
This study showed that 110 of 111 players tested had CTE. But many of their families consented because they suspected CTE already, so it's not a random sample and therefore you can't generalize that to the rest of the population. 110 is 9% of the population of 1300 deceased players for the given time period. CTE is normally extremely rare.
How do you know we aren't seeing the slow onset of dementia for some of these guys? Isn't the whole schtick with Bradshaw that he's a "little off in the head"?
I don't think that it's fair to look at these former players that go into broadcasting and "diagnose" them in anyway. We don't see inside the private lives of these guys and we don't know what struggles they may or may not live with everyday.
I think you are misinterpreting my posts. I'm just trying to make sense of all of this, myself. This report is eye opening to me and I just don't understand it. I understand and accept that the CTE rate for football players is quite high.
What I don't understand is what that means exactly. Are there degrees of CTE? Might some of these players have CTE but hardly ever show much of a symptom in their lives? Or is everyone, as the people who I was responding to suggested, doomed to some sort of dementia where they forget who they are their families are? And if that's the case, shouldn't we see this more often among ex-players who are still in the public? Or are the former players who take these jobs all in the 10% that don't get CTE? Just trying to make sense of the conflicting data here.