A Terrible Thing to Waste
Date Posted: October 28, 2018
Posted In: Discussion,
From The Boston Globe: In life, Aaron Hernandez weighed a muscular 240 pounds.
In death, the most important part of his body was 3½ pounds.
That was the approximate weight of the former New England Patriots player’s brain, which was removed by a Boston coroner soon after Hernandez hanged himself in prison on April 19, 2017. It was then quietly transported to a laboratory about 25 miles north of the city.
To avoid public attention, the brain was brought into Dr. Ann McKee’s research lab through an underground tunnel system. Only three people there knew whose brain was being carefully cut into slices, stained with a special protein-detecting dye, and scrutinized under a microscope.
The results of their examination raised a painful question about America’s most popular sport: Is football fundamentally dangerous?
The violent life and death of Aaron Hernandez has become a case study in that emotionally charged debate, which has resurfaced repeatedly in the long history of a physically punishing game whose players are often compared to gladiators. Like those ancient fighters, football players have a troubling history of dying young, sometimes even on the playing field.
In November 2017, seven months after Hernandez died, Boston University made an explosive announcement. McKee revealed that Hernandez had died with the worst case of chronic traumatic encephalopathy ever seen in someone so young. He was 27 when he took his life.
CTE, a progressive degenerative condition, is believed to be caused by only one thing: repeated hits to the head. In other words, the kind of physical trauma that football players routinely endure. Diagnosing the disease requires removing the brain and analyzing its tissue, so it can only be confirmed after death.
Hernandez’s brain “has been one of the most significant contributions to our work,” said McKee, a neuropathologist who heads Boston University’s CTE Center, which has studied the brains of more than 330 dead football players. “In every place that we looked, it was classic CTE.”
Parts of his brain had become shrunken. Others were unusually enlarged. Some areas had “micro-bleeds.” Some had accumulated a protein called tau commonly found in Alzheimer’s patients. On a CTE severity scale of one to four, Hernandez’s brain was classified as Stage 3. Previously, McKee hadn’t seen so much damage in anyone younger than 46 — almost two decades older.
Before that revelation, Hernandez had drawn tabloid fascination for his extraordinary athletic ability, celebrity lifestyle, and, later, his lurid fall from grace. But McKee’s discovery raised the prospect that Hernandez’s ultimate legacy might be his damaged brain. It was evidence that football’s brutality may have consequences not just for NFL retirees, but active players in their 20s and perhaps younger.