According to a study released on Tuesday, former Australian rules football player Heather Anderson was identified as having chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), making her the first known professional female athlete to receive the diagnosis.
CTE, which can only be identified after a person has passed away, can lead to memory loss, depression, and erratic mood swings in athletes, war veterans, and 토토 other people who frequently suffer head trauma. At age 28, Anderson passed away in November.
After her death, Anderson’s family donated her brain to the Australian Sports Brain Bank.
Anderson’s father stated in a Facebook post at the time that it is believed she committed suicide due to the circumstances of her death. “The response to the news of Heather taking her own life has shown us that she had friends, teammates, and fellow soldiers all across the country,” he wrote.
The family of Anderson was thanked by Buckland for donating her brain, and he expressed the hope that “more families will follow in their footsteps so we can advance the science to help future athletes.”
Anderson was identified by researchers at the Australian Sports Brain Bank, which was launched in 2018 and was jointly funded by the Concussion Legacy Foundation, as having low-stage CTE with three lesions in her brain.
Michael Buckland, director of the ASBB said, “There were multiple CTE lesions as well as abnormalities nearly everywhere I looked in her cortex. It was indistinguishable from the dozens of male cases I’ve seen,”
“She was an avid footballer from 5 years of age, with a total contact sport career length of 18 years. She played across two codes, Australian rules football and rugby league, and participated in both simultaneously for approximately 2 years,”
“By her mid-teens, she had progressed to playing representative women’s Australian rules football, before entering that sport professionally in her early twenties. She retired after one professional season due to musculoskeletal injury.” the Springer Medical Journal said.
In the elite Australian Football League Women’s (AFLW) league in 2017, Anderson participated in eight games for the Adelaide Crows and 토토사이트 made a name for herself by donning a neon pink helmet. Anderson retired from football to resume his career as an army medic after Adelaide won the first AFLW Grand Final.
Few experts seriously questioned if CTE, as it has been shown to be with men, was feasible or plausible in women who routinely play contact sports. According to certain research, women may be more prone to concussions than males and may take longer to recover safely.
“She is the first female athlete diagnosed with CTE, but she will not be the last,” researchers wrote.
“The first case of CTE in a female athlete should be a wakeup call for women’s sports,” Concussion Legacy Foundation CEO Chris Nowinski said. “We can prevent CTE by preventing repeated impacts to the head, and we must begin a dialogue with leaders in women’s sports today so we can save future generations of female athletes from suffering.”
Since 2013, when the National Football League in the United States paid out $765 million to resolve lawsuits from thousands of former players who suffered from dementia or other concussion-related health issues, there has been an increase in awareness of and research into CTE in sports.
