Did boxing damage play a role in Boston bombings?
By Jeffrey Kluger, TIME.com
updated 10:03 AM EDT, Wed April 24, 2013
(TIME.com) -- Tamerlan Tsarnaev is telling no tales. The older of the two brothers who committed the Boston Marathon bombings was likely the one who planned the attack, but when he died in a shootout with police just days after the blasts, his thoughts and motivations vanished with him.
But the brain that was home to his angry mind remains, and in this case that may mean something.
Tsarnaev was an amateur boxer who won the New England Golden Gloves competition as recently as 2009 and 2010. That speaks to a young man with a healthy sense of discipline and focus, and if he had a violent streak, it was violence well-channeled.
But his sport of choice suggests the possibility of something else too: traumatic brain injury.
As the National Football League and other pro sports increasingly reckon with the early dementia, mental health issues, suicides and even criminal behavior of former players, the risk of what's known as chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), is becoming clear.
Boxers are perhaps the best-studied victims of CTE, with the consequences of consistent trauma to the head described initially as "punch drunk," but emerging as CTE in the 1950s, says Dr. Robert Stern, cofounder of the Boston University Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy. The term "better describes a neurodegenerative disease caused, at least in part, by repetitive brain trauma," he says.
http://www.cnn.com/2013/04/24/health/boxing-boston-bombing/index.html
By Jeffrey Kluger, TIME.com
updated 10:03 AM EDT, Wed April 24, 2013
(TIME.com) -- Tamerlan Tsarnaev is telling no tales. The older of the two brothers who committed the Boston Marathon bombings was likely the one who planned the attack, but when he died in a shootout with police just days after the blasts, his thoughts and motivations vanished with him.
But the brain that was home to his angry mind remains, and in this case that may mean something.
Tsarnaev was an amateur boxer who won the New England Golden Gloves competition as recently as 2009 and 2010. That speaks to a young man with a healthy sense of discipline and focus, and if he had a violent streak, it was violence well-channeled.
But his sport of choice suggests the possibility of something else too: traumatic brain injury.
As the National Football League and other pro sports increasingly reckon with the early dementia, mental health issues, suicides and even criminal behavior of former players, the risk of what's known as chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), is becoming clear.
Boxers are perhaps the best-studied victims of CTE, with the consequences of consistent trauma to the head described initially as "punch drunk," but emerging as CTE in the 1950s, says Dr. Robert Stern, cofounder of the Boston University Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy. The term "better describes a neurodegenerative disease caused, at least in part, by repetitive brain trauma," he says.
http://www.cnn.com/2013/04/24/health/boxing-boston-bombing/index.html
