The brain disease CTE has become tied to professional football, but Ann McKee helped discover that even in high school and college, a player’s risk doubles every few years.
Ann McKee has lost track of how many human brains she’s held. “Probably 3,000, not anything more than that,” she says casually. Most people haven’t held even one. But one of the largest collections of brains in the world lies nestled in the Boston area, and McKee is its steward.
By the time a brain gets to McKee, she’s seeing CTE at its worst and most progressive, and after a person has already died. But it’s the life of the person she’s learning about through pathology that stays with her. “To look at another person’s brain, to me, there’s a high level of trust and privacy,” she says. “I do feel very honored in a funny way that I have this privilege.”
McKee says one of the most disturbing studies she has worked on was in 2019, when her lab reported that for every 2.6 years of football played at any level—high school, college, or professional—an athlete’s risk of CTE doubles. The culprit is the types of hits to the head that are so endemic to the game, and so seemingly mild, that most people play right through them.
Finding biomarkers of the disease in blood or cerebrospinal fluid—the liquid that surrounds the brain and spinal cord—is key to that advance. McKee thinks that’s about five years away. McKee got busy. She founded the brain bank, which today houses about 1,200 brains. She collected data; she made those graphs—and enlarged pictures of microscope slides to a scale where even an untrained eye could appreciate a pattern lifting from the noise. She published hundreds of papers. And in 2011 she testified before the U.S. Congress about the prevalence of CTE in athletes and military members.
About 150 of the brains she has access to right now are from donors under the age of 34; a majority died by suicide.
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