The Australian Sports Brain Bank

The Australian Sports Brain Bank (ASBB) has revealed that more than half of the donors they analysed showed signs of the degenerative brain disease chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE). CTE was first described in 1928 by Dr Harrison Martland. Martland, who chronicled a group of boxers as having “punch drunk syndrome”. In 2005 the first evidence was published linking CTE within American Football. This was when the sporting world really began to take notice. 

In Australia, the first documented case of CTE in professional sports was Steve Folkes, whose career spanned 13 years with the Canterbury Bulldogs and Hull FC. Following the release of the ASBB data, his son, Daniel expressed his concerns for other players of his fathers' generation. 

“All of Dad’s friends we grew up around at footy, when you have a chat to them, you think, ‘Oh, they’re not the same - and is more going to come to the surface?’

‍The data from the ASBB showed that all but 1 of the 21 brains investigated had some form of neurodegeneration.  All the donors had played sports where repetitive head injury was a risk. Seventeen played either Australian rules football, rugby league or rugby union. The authors highlight that CTE was more prevalent amongst those who had played professionally but had also been found in amateurs and those who had played sport under modern concussion protocols.

A sample size of 21 is small when considering the thousands of retired and current professional players. Additionally, a bias could be at play because donors or their families had agreed to be part of the research based on concerns relating to repeated head impacts. However, building on previous findings investigating CTE amongst retired athletes, the trend is only going one way.

In the light of increased information about concussion and head impact injuries, many sports are taking action. The Rugby League Players Association (RLPA) is keen to look not just at in-game collisions, but to examine training in order to give a greater understanding of the total contact training load. 

RLPA boss Clint Newton said, “the management of concussions and our desire to better understand CTE is necessary, and we fully support anything that advances player health and safety”.

Across the NRL, HITIQ technology is being used to help monitor and manage players in both training and matches.  Newton continued, “as a game, we have never done more to monitor and protect players when considering head injuries. Innovative technology will play an essential role in identifying and understanding impacts at training, the return to training and playing policies, and anyone that may be more susceptible to injury.”

A similar strategy is being used by rugby union’s Crusaders. They use the HITIQ platform to help assess player impact loads. Performance staff then ensure the number and size of impacts that the players are sustaining during different training drills are carefully managed.

Gareth Duder, Crusaders Head of Performance said, “data from the HITIQ Nexus system aims to help my team quantify players impact load. We can then adjust training and recovery stimulus/thresholds accordingly, which is absolute gold”.

The findings of the ASBB add to the concerns of many about the consequences of head impact injury during a lifetime of sport. The Head of the ASBB, Associate Professor Michael Buckland, has spoken of his desire for sports to have a concussion and CTE minimisation policy. He believes a key principle should be “reducing cumulative lifetime exposure to head knocks”. In order to achieve this, players first have to be monitored to understand how impact load is accumulating. HITIQ has the technology to achieve this. Its impact classification system is monitoring players across sport with the goal of making them and the sports safer. 

Unfortunately for Steve Folkes and his contemporaries the understanding of concussion and CTE just didn’t exist during their time in professional sport. However, via the increased understanding that is coming from the past players whose brains are part of ASBB research, this can change for future generations. Bringing together the latest technological innovations, focused research and a will to protect players, the outcomes for those entering sport now, can be much more positive.