Football and Brain Injuries

'Taint just football players. Ask Harvard grad and former WWE wrestler Chris Nowinski about his concussions. Yes, that's a plural.

It's not limited to sports figures, either. Trust me, thirty-some years of working with livestock gets you multiple shots to the head. After enough of them, you just accept concussions, mild or otherwise, as part of the routine.

It's common to the sport of Professional Boxing too. Just look at Ali, today, compared to the man he was 25+ years ago.

In Ali's case, it may well have more to do with Parkinson's disease than boxing.

Is that true, cowdoc? (I certainly haven't researched it lately.)

A friend of mine and I met Ali and probably his wife in front of a bakery in Santa Monica. Well, she met him, I stood back, as did his wife. My friend saw him and gasped, and each said a few sentences about being pleased to meet you. Ali kissed her hand. This was years after his problem started.

As it happens, her father was a boxer, and had the like-alzheimer's/parkinson's thing before his death, not all so long before that.

But, isn't Parkinson's disease found mainly in individuals, who 've never experienced trauma to the head, as one would normally find in professional sports?

Sorry, Miller, I don't understand the connection, or lack thereof, between sports and Parkinson's. I haven't heard anything about Ali's condition lately, but I'm pretty sure he was diagnosed several years before the Atlanta Olympics, when he was barely able to light the flame.