DSting
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- Sep 19, 2011
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Everyone, and especially the researchers themselves, are aware of the limitations. What you propose is strictly impossible, by the way. Currently, a CTE diagnosis can only be rendered posthumously. So unless you're planning on killing your cohort of children at age 30 to pry open their skulls, you're just going to have to make do with relatively small n convenience samples of people who donated their dead brains.
I've said this before, though. Even if literally nobody else but the brains they had in the last study had CTE (in which they found like 95% had CTE), it would still represent about 10% of the NFL population who died during the period brains were collected. That's literally the bottom floor possible (it's probably several times higher), and even that is stunning, epidemic levels. By contrast, it presents in just a fraction of a percentage point of the non-football population.
Strawman fallacy on your part, but that's irrelevant. It wouldn't require opening the brain of every member of a study to gather information. CTE sufferers exhibit certain behavioral changes. Study the behavior and see if naturally aggressive males, the ones who gravitate to football, have higher rates of depression, anti-social behavior and suicide. There are many ways to get valid information instead of running studies that confirm what you already thought and wanted to find.
The CTE studies are guilty of post hoc assumptions--after this, therefore because of this. Just because some reputable group runs a poorly designed study and trumpets their findings doesn't make them right. A large segment of society would love to see the downfall of traditional male activities and will not dig too deeply into the study design if it confirms what they just had to know was right.