November 15, 2018
Boston Children’s Hospital has won a $14.7 million grant from the National Football League to study how hits to the head affect neurological health over time — and to identify potential treatments for brain injuries.
The money enables Children’s and four collaborating institutions to study thousands of former NFL players and to investigate ways of mitigating the damage from head impacts.
The grant to Children’s is the largest of five awards totaling $35 million that the NFL announced Thursday, as part of its commitment to support medical research. The grants included $1.5 million for a project of Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital and Harvard Medical School to study the short- and long-term effects of concussions on high school athletes.
The Children’s project will last five years. At the end, researchers will propose clinical trials to test the most promising of the treatments, which could potentially help those with chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, the brain condition that has afflicted football stars such as the late Aaron Hernandez.
Unlike the highly publicized CTE research examining the brains of deceased athletes, this project will focus on the living — former NFL players who have volunteered to answer questions and undergo tests.
“What makes us unique is that we’re studying specific treatments and specific preventive strategies,” said Dr. William Meehan of Boston Children’s Orthopedics and Sports Medicine Center, the project’s leader.
Children’s researchers have been studying sports-related concussions for a decade, in collaboration with Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center; Beth Israel Deaconess will also be part of the NFL-funded research. Children’s was selected in a competitive process to lead the project, Meehan said.
Research suggests that CTE occurs when multiple hits to the head, even those that don’t cause a concussion or produce symptoms, trigger a degenerative process in the brain that years or decades later can cause disabling mental problems, including agitation, impulsivity, explosive tempers, depression, anxiety, and memory loss.
CTE has been diagnosed in former amateur and professional athletes as well as military veterans, but it is not known how common it is or why some are afflicted and not others. Still, the drumbeat of CTE news and the involvement of high-profile athletes has led parents to worry about enrolling their children in contact sports.
Studying CTE is tricky because it cannot be diagnosed until after death, and early symptoms resemble those of other conditions. The best-known research into CTE has involved examining donated brains.
In contrast, the Children’s project aims to provide new insights about the living, by assessing the neurological health of retired NFL players. Some 2,500 players were first interviewed in 2001 by University of North Carolina researchers; since then, the study group has grown to more than 3,000 and Children’s hopes to recruit more, Meehan said. The players’ names and data will be kept confidential, he said.
The researchers will survey them annually, and also conduct more intense testing on a few hundred of the players, performing brain scans, blood tests, and other physical and neurological measurements.
The team wants to see whether the players’ neurologic health correlates with the number of concussions they experienced or with the number of blows to the head that did not produce concussion symptoms.
They will try to measure tau — a brain protein that becomes misshapen after injury and may trigger CTE — through brain scans and blood tests. The goal will be to see whether abnormal levels of the protein can be detected in the living, signaling the presence of CTE.
The researchers will also examine four potential treatments for CTE: an antibody that in mouse studies has been shown to destroy the toxic tau; memantine, a drug used to treat Alzheimer’s disease; carbon monoxide, a poisonous gas that in low doses may protect the brain after injury; and “environmental enrichment” — using physical and mental exercises to keep the brain healthy.
In addition to Children’s and Beth Israel Deaconess, the project consortium will include the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the Medical College of Wisconsin, and the University Orthopedic Center at Penn State.
The NFL assembled an advisory board of leading scientific experts to help select the grant winners from among 129 applicants. In addition to the awards to the Children’s and Spaulding groups, the grants include $6 million to the University of Pittsburgh, $9.4 million to the University of Calgary, and $3.4 million the University of California, San Francisco.
Thursday’s awards expend all but $5 million from the $40 million pool that the NFL allocated for medical research. The league said the remaining money would be distributed later to medical research on player health and safety.
Amid accusations of failing to adequately protect players from head injury, in 2016 the league pledged $100 million to fund research. Of that, $60 million is going to engineering and biomechanical studies, such as developing safer helmets, and the remaining $40 million was targeted for medical research, primarily neuroscience.
In a separate earlier effort, the NFL allocated $30 million toward a partnership with the National Institutes of Health that fell apart in 2017 with less than half of the money spent. But the league earlier this year announced that it was spending the remaining $16.3 million on several government-run research projects into concussions, traumatic brain injury, and age-related dementia.
The league has also pledged $1 billion in a settlement with more than 20,000 retired players suffering from the aftereffects of head injuries on the field.
Felice J. Freyer can be reached at [email protected]. Follow her on Twitter @felicejfreyer.
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