National Football League just added to reputation for sabotaging concussion truth

Three large letters were missing from a news release that announced concussion researchers – led by the groundbreaking group at Boston University – secured a $16 million National Institutes of Health grant this week: NFL.

But ESPN, citing unnamed sources, reported the league backed out of the having its money finance the study when the NIH awarded the project to a group led by a prominent Boston University researcher Robert Stern, a professor of neurology and neurosurgery who has been outspoken against the league.

When contacted Monday by ESPN, NFL spokesman Brian McCarthy referred questions to the NIH. The league insists that it simply doesn’t weigh in on the merits of the studies; to hear the NFL tell it, the league just gave the NIH $30 million for brain research and lets the NIH take it from there.

OTL also noted that Dr. Ann McKee, a neuropathologist who works with BU, recently received a $6 million grant from the NIH that came from the NFL’s 2012 donation.

“The study seeks to capture what has been described as the holy grail of concussion research: the ability to diagnose chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, in living patients”, ESPN reported.

Through the Sports and Health Research Program (SHRP) -a partnership among the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the National Football League (NFL), and the Foundation for the National Institutes of Health (FNIH)-multiple studies have been and will continue to be funded to examine traumatic brain injury in athletes. Stern wrote that the settlement would deny compensation to many deserving players, including some of the most severely disabled. Stern has been critical of the NFL in the past, including the NFL’s settlement of a lawsuit in which former players accused the league of hiding information on the link between playing football and brain damage in October 2014. “And as a scientist I have always and will always conduct research with complete impartiality”.

The NFL has backed out of a massive research project that is seeking to better understand the relationship between playing football and brain disease, according to a report. “If I say things about the National Football League or others that may sound negative, that has nothing to do with the impartiality of my science”. “NIH makes its own decisions”.