Late last month, the New York City medical examiner confirmed the man who shot and killed four people at a Manhattan office tower had the degenerative brain disease Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, also known as CTE.
The shooter, Shane Tamura, targeted the NFL headquarters in July. He left a note at the scene, claiming to suffer from CTE. He blamed football, which he played from age 6 through high school.
Tamura shot himself in the chest. His letter urged scientists to study his brain. That note included the names of prominent researchers in the field, including neuroscientist Chris Nowinski, CEO of the Concussion Legacy Foundation and a former professional wrestler.
Nowinski said he wasn’t surprised by Tamura’s diagnosis.
“CTE risk in football players, we know from the work at the Boston University CTE Center, is related to how many years of football you play. And we don’t know where it starts, but the research thus far suggests it goes up by as much as 30% per year you play, your odds increase,” Nowinski said. “And in our experience now at BU studying hundreds of football players, if you get to 12 seasons, more than half of those that we’ve studied have had it.”
6 questions with Chris Nowinski
What is CTE?
“Chronic traumatic encephalopathy is a degenerative brain disease that is caused by repeated hits to the head. We used to talk about it as caused by concussions, but now we know it’s more than that.
“Essentially, we’ve learned that football players and other athletes, military veterans, can be taking repeated hits that feel fine, but is causing microscopic brain damage. And some of these hits, for some reason, in some people will cause not just an injury, but an injury that continues to progress into brain degeneration in similar ways that Alzheimer’s disease operates.”
How common is violence as a result of CTE?
“We don’t know how common violence is because we can’t diagnose CTE in the living right now. A family donates the brain, and then we interview the family to try to get someone’s history. And we do often hear stories about normal people becoming more aggressive with the disease or becoming violent with the disease.
“But because we’re only getting this snapshot and often decades after those behaviors change, it’s hard to draw conclusions. That being said, we have a remarkable number of individuals who have taken the lives of others in the brain bank. I knew some of them during life. Someone like Chris Benoit, who I wrestled with at WWE, who killed his family and himself.
“I, as somebody who has been studying this now for 20 years, and knowing some of these people personally, I don’t think these homicides are happening without the presence of brain damage and brain disease.”
Your name was in Shane Tamura’s letter. How are you processing that now, several months later?
“I first heard my name was in it without any context as to why. Then, when I actually was able to see the letter, it was very strange to sort of be thanked by someone who did something so terrible. I think my name was in there along with other people because he saw a documentary that we were in, where we were talking about how the CTE issue had been covered up.
“But the goal of raising awareness of this is not only to get sports to change, which they’re now changing, including the NFL. But also to help families know what they might be dealing with and to then seek help and care. It’s also important to say, though, he had been under psychiatric holds multiple times. He was seeing doctors. They couldn’t fix him.”
As you’ve said, CTE can’t be diagnosed while someone is alive. What does a person do if they notice something going on inside their bodies? They know it, but they can’t prove it. That must be terrifying.
“And it was even harder 20 years ago, when nobody knew that this even existed. And at least now people are connecting the dots that if you hit somebody in the head 10 or 20,000 times, we should not be surprised that some of them start behaving dramatically differently as they age and as their brain degenerates.
“What we recommend for people, and this is my cohort as well, is we encourage people to seek care. Let them know that care does help in most situations and medical care and otherwise.”
Were there moments in your life where you felt that you might be suffering some of these symptoms?
“We just diagnosed my second teammate off of my Harvard football team with CTE after he died in terrible circumstances. So I know that this is going to be either something I deal with or it’s something that my friends and teammates are going to continue to deal with. And so that’s why I feel like a tremendous sense of urgency to advance the research so that we can diagnose this in living people and that we can develop effective therapies or possibly a cure.”
What should parents do? How do we prevent this in kids or young people who are never going to make it to the highest level of any sport?
“It’s remarkably easy to prevent CTE. We just need to stop hitting kids in the head. What we are saying right now is that if you know your child is under 14, under no circumstances should they be in an activity where they’re getting hit in the head hundreds of times a year. They should not be playing tackle football. They should not be heading soccer balls. They should not be checking in ice hockey. For those last two, there are now age minimums that exist because they’ve heard this message. Football, we’re still tackling at five years old, which no one has any business doing. No one should be hitting your kid in the head before high school.
“And then in high school, we need to inspire coaches and train them on how to dramatically reduce the number of hits to the head our kids take, if you want to put them at risk for this, in those sports. The National Federation of High School Athletic Associations does not recognize that sports cause CTE. And that’s a shame because the NFL does. And so we have to push to make youth sports safer. And that starts with acknowledging that CTE exists. And I hope this case, as horrible as it is, will get people’s attention that we are definitely giving children a lifelong brain disease, and it will send some of them down this path. I don’t think there’s any question about that because we keep seeing it over and over again.
“We should not be hitting kids in the head and giving them a brain disease. We just should not.”
This interview was edited for clarity.
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Jenna Griffiths and Samantha Raphelson produced and edited this interview for broadcast with Micaela Rodriguez. Allison Hagan adapted it for the web.
This article was originally published on WBUR.org.
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