Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Head games

2012; Elsevier BV; Volume: 11; Issue: 7 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1016/s1474-4422(12)70150-3

1474-4465

Peter Ranscombe,

Traumatic Brain Injury Research

With his rippling muscles and broad shoulders, Chris Nowinski doesn't immediately come across as an advocate for minimising the effects of concussions and other brain injuries in sport. Yet this former World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) star is at the forefront of publicising the health problems that sports such as American football, ice hockey, and even football—or soccer—can cause for players. Head Games, the latest documentary from director Steve James, tells the story of how Nowinksi—after playing American football while studying at Harvard—went on to become a WWE wrestler. Commenting on his time playing football at college, Nowinski admitted: “I love the violence of it. I loved being a warrior without going to war.” His career was cut short after only 2 years when a concussion forced him to retire and, after his headaches and memory problems had continued for 12 months, he visited Robert Cantu, clinical professor of neurosurgery at Boston University School of Medicine. Cantu diagnosed Nowinski with post-concussion syndrome and, in doing so, triggered a desire in the sportsman to better understand this disorder and how playing American football and then becoming a wrestler might have contributed to it. Cantu explained to Nowinski how repeated blows to his head could have damaged his brain. “I'd exposed myself to repeated concussions for 19 years without having that conversation,” Nowinski said. Being diagnosed with a brain injury prompted the former wrestler to research post-concussion syndrome and chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a more serious progressive degenerative disease of the brain that was recorded in boxers as early as the 1920s. With help from New York Times sports reporter Alan Schwarz, his research was published in 2006 as a book called Head Games: Football's Concussion Crisis. James's film explains how the book sent shockwaves through the National Football League (NFL), the organisation in charge of American football. Cantu and Nowinski founded the Sports Legacy Institute in 2007 to educate players about concussion and the lasting health problems it can cause and, a year later, launched the Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy at Boston University to do research into the disorder. The Center's research includes the building of a brain bank that now contains 110 brains, including samples from brains of sportsmen who had chronic traumatic encephalopathy. Studies done by researchers at the Center and by others have had far-reaching consequences; Cantu has been appointed as a senior advisor to the NFL's Head, Neck & Spine Committee, while the National Hockey League, the body that organises ice hockey in the USA, has started screening videos featuring “chief player disciplinarian” Brendan Shanahan explaining why ice hockey players have been banned for breaches of the rules that could lead to head injuries for other players. But with concussion and other head injuries seemingly firmly on the agenda for professional sports in America, why did Nowinski make the Head Games film? “Your brain is a lot more vulnerable than you realise and you only get one of them so you should take better care of it,” Nowinski told The Lancet Neurology. Although professional athletes are becoming more aware of the dangers, Nowinski hopes the film will educate parents of the risks to their children who are playing contact sports. The film uses the example of Cindy Parlow, a retired soccer player, who shares her experiences of how heading the ball and clashing heads with other players led to concussion. For a British audience perhaps unfamiliar with American sports, her confessions about football, and Nowinski's comparison between American football and rugby, made the topic relevant. Judging by the standing ovation that the film received at its world premiere on March 21, 2012, at the International Brain Injury Association's ninth world congress in Edinburgh, UK, this is an important documentary. The film strikes the right balance between the narrative and the science, using individual players' stories to explain that damage to brain tissue—which leads to the build-up of abnormal tau proteins—has a very real effect on people's lives. The most chilling example is the story with which the film opens and to which it returns at key points during the narrative; a team of children playing American football are involved in a David versus Goliath struggle with an opposing side. “In the United States, you can't drive until you're 16, smoke until you're 18, or drink until your 21,” said Nowinski, who hopes the film will tour around festivals this summer. “So why do we allow children to make decisions about whether to play sports in which they might receive a head injury?”