NFL Vetoed Funding For Boston University CTE Study, Per ESPN Report

The NFL, which spent years criticizing researchers who warned about the dangers of football-related head trauma, has backed out of one of the most ambitious studies yet on the relationship between football and brain disease, sources familiar with the project told Outside the Lines.

The money for the research was to be taken out of a $30 million “unrestricted” grant the NFL had given to the National Institutes of Health in 2012. “And as a scientist I have always and will always conduct research with complete impartiality”. (Currently, it can only be seen in an autopsy.) But according to today’s ESPN report, the National Football League exercised that veto power upon learning that the project would be led by Robert Stern, a professor of neurology and neurosurgery at Boston University.

“The grant that is now being directly funded by the National Institutes of Health, and led by Boston University, was originally written as part of an [request for proposals] for a study that would be funded by the $30 million from the NFL”, Nowinski said. “We’re trying to get answers for people”.

The NFL wasted virtually no time refuting the ESPN report, as NFL PR representative Brian McCarthy tweeted this shortly after the report was released. Stern now serves BU as the director of clinical research for both the Alzheimer’s Disease and CTE centers.

Previously, the biggest obstacle to being able to diagnose and study the brain disease is that the doctors have needed to examine players’ brains and the only way that’s been possible is for the player to be dead. NIH makes its own decisions. He wrote that commissioner Roger Goodell inherited a concussion cover-up from Paul Tagliabue and when a concussion settlement was first announced, Stern filed a 61-page letter of opposition.

None of those ex-players was told definitively they had CTE, Bailes said, though that didn’t stop Hall of Fame running back Tony Dorsett from going public with his results.

But since then, the NFL has poured tens of millions of dollars into concussion research, allowing the league to maintain a powerful role on an issue that directly threatens its future.

Boston University, through its CTE Center, has been on the forefront of research into the study of brain trauma. It was found in 87 former National Football League players over the past decade.

“Because there are a lot of guys like me with our brains likely rotting inside in our heads as we speak, who need a way to treat this before it goes to far”, Nowinkski said. “People should not overreact and be fearful that they’re going to develop CTE, especially our youth athletes”.