matthearn.com

My son Charles is very large for his age, and shows every sign of becoming a rather sizeable fellow. I suspect that football coaches will notice this. And I will do everything in my power to discourage him from playing. Why? Read Malcolm Gladwell on the subject.

[L]ate last month the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research released the findings of an N.F.L.-funded phone survey of just over a thousand randomly selected retired N.F.L. players—all of whom had played in the league for at least three seasons. Self-reported studies are notoriously unreliable instruments, but, even so, the results were alarming. Of those players who were older than fifty, 6.1 per cent reported that they had received a diagnosis of “dementia, Alzheimer’s disease, or other memory-related disease.” That’s five times higher than the national average for that age group. For players between the ages of thirty and forty-nine, the reported rate was nineteen times the national average.