by Ken Belson
Researchers at several universities and research institutes were awarded almost $16 million Tuesday to find a way to diagnose, while victims are alive, chronic traumaticencephalopathy, a degenerative brain disease linked to repeated head hits in contact sports.
The National Institutes of Health and the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke issued the seven-year grant as part of a long-term study of brain disease in former N.F.L. and college football players, many of whom sustained multiple concussions on the field.
Despite the implications that the research may have on football players and the N.F.L., no league money will be used to help pay for the grant.
For years, researchers have been able to diagnose C.T.E. only by examining the brains of players who died and whose families agreed to donate the organ, a limitation that has slowed efforts to determine who is susceptible to having the disease.
The new study, considered among the most ambitious in the field of sports-related brain injury, aims to develop ways to spot the disease in the living and figure out why certain players get it and others do not. A more comprehensive understanding of the disease, the researchers said, may lead to ways to prevent it.
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