Brandi Chastain’s announcement last week that she will donate her brain to Boston University research into Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy took one of the hot-button health issues of the past year to a different plane.
To this point, most of the discussion of CTE has focused on men, and more specifically on former professional football players. The conversation reached a crescendo with the December release of Concussion, a film spotlighting the research and discovery of CTE by Dr. Bennet Omalu and the NFL’s efforts to marginalize the issue.
But Chastain, whose 1999 World Cup-winning penalty kick and its subsequent celebration established her as an icon of women’s sports in America, has helped ensure that not only will CTE – a degenerative brain condition believed to be connected to concussions – stay in the public conversation, but that the voices having the conversation will be more representative of the entire sports spectrum.
“A question I have is, do men’s and women’s brains look and respond differently?” Chastain told USA Today. “I’m a recovering two-time ACL reconstruction athlete. Why are ACL injuries more common in girls and women than boys and men? Could that also be true with concussions? And if true, what can we do differently?”
Ann McKee, the director of Boston University’s CTE Program, told USA Today: “We currently know so little about how gender influences outcome after trauma. Her pledge marks an important step to expand our knowledge in this critical area.”
In 2014, St. Elizabeth Sports Medicine treated 332 patients for concussions. While the majority were male, and football was the most common sport in which those patients were injured, 25 percent were female, and soccer was the No. 2 sport for concussions overall.
Dr. Michael J. Miller, medical director of St. Elizabeth Sports Medicine and an expert in concussions, told Healthy Headlines in December that he considers concussions to be a “hidden epidemic.”
Approaching the topic not only as a physician, but as a parent. “My daughter plays soccer, and she did have a concussion, and I was very concerned,” he said.
Dr. Miller said that young athletes need to know that in most incidents of concussion, that player doesn’t lose consciousness.
“The kids don’t recognize what’s wrong with them, or more concerning, they don’t want to come forward because they don’t want to come out of a game,” Dr. Miller said.
Chastain, now 47, told USA Today she twice suffered concussions while playing in college, but came right back into the game both times. She said she suffered no symptoms from concussions or signs of degenerative brain disease.
“I’ve never had an official diagnosis of a concussion in my career,” she said, “but as you grow older, you sometimes say, gosh, am I losing my memory or did I used to forget when I went into a room what I went in there for? Could this be the start of something?”
Dr. Miller told Healthy Headlines that among concerns with CTE are what he called “sub-concussive events” – blows to the head that don’t rise to the level of concussion, but that may have a cumulative effect. They’re common in soccer, where headers are a fundamental part of both offense and defense.
Chastain told USA Today she sometimes “saw stars” after headers, but never complained, and wondered if kids should be doing headers at all. The U.S. Soccer Federation in November approved new guidelines for youth soccer that call for kids 11-13 to head the ball only in practice, not games, and for younger kids to avoid headers altogether.
“” Can doctors and scientists and neuroscientists look at the brain of someone like me, who has been playing soccer a majority of my life, and really dissect the brain and say, ‘Here’s where we see it beginning?’” Chastain told USA Today. “Could we then use that information to help say that before the age of 14, it’s not a good idea to head the ball?’ ”
