When we talk about brain damage associated with sports, everyone immediately thinks of boxing. But also other contact sports – the football americanoil rugbyl’ice hockeyeven the soccer – hide a dark side. An investigation, the first conducted in Italian with special attention to events that occurred in our country, collected from the book “Headers – The silent massacre of contact sports” by Tommaso Clerici, published by 66thand2nd, which reveals the devastating consequences of head trauma that affect athletes of different disciplines: like Mike Webster, a former NFL player who could only sleep by stunning himself with a taser, or like Chris Benoit, the wrestler who killed his wife and son before taking his own life. In many of them, afflicted by memory lapses, depression and uncontrolled outbursts of anger, we find the same, merciless Diagnosis: Chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, a serious neurodegenerative disease that can only be detected with certainty after death.
