Wanted: Five hundred former college athletes, men and women, to answer a few questions online and in a telephone interview about their athletic history, lifestyle, current cognitive and mental health, etc. Takes about an hour. Pays 50 bucks. Must be over 50 to apply.
If this sounds like you, Dr. C. Munro Cullum of UT Southwestern’s Peter O’Donnell Jr. Brain Institute’s College Level Aging Athlete Study, or CLEAATS, wants you to suit up one more time.
CLEAATS is an attempt to catch up in an area where there’s been little research as to how sports-related concussions may impact brain wellness in later life. Former NFL players have been the subject of scrutiny, both in the media as well as scientific studies. Even high school athletes have had their day as lab rats.
Former college athletes with no pro experience?
Not so much.
Turns out what you don’t know could hurt you. Or maybe not. That’s the point of the study that kicked off last fall after a $500,000 grant from the Darrell K Royal Research Fund.
“A lot of parents, a lot of athletes now, are really, really worried about potential long-term effects of concussions,” Cullum said recently. “I hear young people, even high school kids, talking about CTE sometimes.
“And you know, there’s so much we don’t know.”
Cullum, a co-principal investigator of the project who’s worked with the Cowboys and is a consultant with the Stars’ concussion testing program, is eager to see where this survey leads. He anticipates a broad spectrum of results from former NCAA and NAIA athletes who played contact as well as noncontact sports. He doesn’t discriminate.
You had one or more concussions in college? You qualify. No concussions? That’s good, too.
Trouble remembering what you had for breakfast?
You’re in.
You can still name everyone at last night’s party?
I hate you, but Dr. Cullum will take you, too.
The wider the study, the better, particularly the response of women.
“There’s a real gap in the literature in terms of what happens to aging female athletes in particular,” Cullum said.
Here’s what we do know: Even after all the horror stories and lawsuits and media awareness in the last decade, myths still abound. For instance, you don’t have to be knocked out to sustain a concussion, a temporary, often momentary, disruption of brain function. In fact, in 90% of diagnosed concussions, the subject never loses consciousness. Concussion victims don’t have to remain for days in a dark room deprived of all media, either. They could return to a regular routine after a couple of days, though athletes may take longer while ramping up physical exertion.
And playing football or soccer or any sport commonly associated with concussions doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll end up with Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, or CTE, defined by the Boston University CTE Center as a degenerative brain disease found in athletes, military veterans and others with a history of brain trauma.
“We don’t know who’s really at risk for CTE,” Cullum said. “Just hitting your head a lot doesn’t necessarily cause CTE.”
Most of the research, in fact, suggests high school, college and pro athletes turn out just fine in the long run. But it’s not exactly a comfort to parents wanting to know if their child is more susceptible than others.
Cullum has spoken at events where parents tell him, “Well, you wouldn’t let your son play football.”
Actually, he did.
Soccer, too.
Cullum is as personally invested as everyone else, which is why he’s grateful for the grant. Debbie Hanna, president of the DKR Fund, said last fall at the study’s kickoff that the results “will be an important part of the continuing legacy of Coach Royal and has the strong support of Edith Royal, who, now well into her 90s, continues to be the driving force behind the DKR Research Fund. No one has ever cared more deeply about the well-being of college athletes than Coach and Mrs. Royal, so it is a fitting initiative for this organization to fund and stand behind.”
Hanna added that she hopes the findings will allow society “to reasonably balance the risk and rewards of participating in college sports.”
But there’s still a lot of work to do, beginning with accumulating data. So far, the study has drawn more than a hundred responses, still only a quarter of the minimum. And of those, only a fourth were women. Cullum wants equal representation. For that matter, he’d like a thousand responses. The more, the better in phase one.
Once they get enough responses and check the results, they want to refine it by taking a larger, in-depth study over a number of years that would include blood-based biomarkers, neuroimaging and detailed cognitive assessments. Cullum hopes to drill down and see how gender, socioeconomic and racial differences impact concussion effects.
But, first things first, all you old college jocks out there need to do your duty and sign up. Google CLEAATS or go to cleaats.com or email Hannah Doggett at Hannah.Doggett@utsouthwestern.edu. Tell them your story. For once, somebody will actually listen.
Twitter: @KSherringtonDMN
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