Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
The Clare Byrne Show on Newstalk.
With Aviva Insurance.
My next guest will be in front of an Oireachtas committee on sport this week presenting on the issue of long-term effects of repetitive head injuries in retired athletes and with rugby in particular the question is have the dangers started to outweigh the benefits such as the gladiatorial nature of the sport.
Dr Colin Doherty is head of the School of Medicine at Trinity College Dublin and consultant urologist at St James's Hospital and he joins me now. Good morning to you.
Morning, Clare.
Thank you for being with us. More and more, I'm seeing articles about this. I mean, I mentioned a piece in the Sunday Times at the weekend by David Walsh, who went to New Zealand and spoke to families connected with three players on the same team who had suffered CTE, which is a degenerative brain condition, isn't it, linked to repetitive concussion and head injury?
Yes, I mean, this is pretty, I mean, in my mind, it's pretty uncontroversial now. And most people have heard that term. It stands for chronic traumatic encephalopathy, which is just a long word to suggest dementia that's associated with a career, long term career of repetitive head injury.
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Chapter 2: What are the long-term effects of head injuries in retired athletes?
And it's not just athletes. It does affect other groups like ex-military, etc. But obviously, athletes are in the crosshairs here.
So what are you saying today in this article that you have written in the Irish Times and in your presentation to the Oireachtas committee? I mean, are you crossing that line that so many are nervous of crossing and saying, why would we put our children into this sport of rugby when we know what the outcome might be?
Yeah, I feel that I've been banging this drum for a decade. I've been saying this in less temperate language, less intemperate language. I kind of felt my frustration came through in the article. I was glad they didn't edit it out. I really do feel that we need to make a change here. And like anybody who enjoys the sport, it just needs to be a safer game.
And I'm not saying I have all the answers to making it safer. I'm calling for a sport-wide, government-wide response. to come together and decide how do we profile risk, how do we decide how to reduce the dose of blows to the head and make the game safer. That's it. It's not a question of crossing any Rubicon. To my mind, that happened a decade ago. We knew this was the issue.
By the way, this goes back a century. Knowing this, we know, for instance, in a famous paper from the 1960s, that one in five professional boxers will get dementia from boxing. That's been known since the 1960s. So the idea that this is all new and it's all come out of the blue and lots more work needs to be done before we can make any changes. That's just ridiculous.
This has been a long standing known problem with repetitive head injury. And now we need to take action.
And is it just rugby that you're concerned about?
No. My focus has been on rugby because I've done most of my research in that area. I do think that there is more collision than contact in rugby compared to maybe other sports. There's no question there's a problem for football in relation to heading the ball. As you know, in the US now, underage sports have banned heading in younger age groups. And I think the GAA, in my view, also...
Because rugby has a bigger profile in this area, it tends to hide behind the idea that rugby is a completely different sport.
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Chapter 3: What is chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) and its implications?
But we all know, we've seen it on the GAA pitches, severe injuries. So look, every sport has to take this seriously. I would say that there needs to be a code that we all sign up to. It's incredible in Scotland that they've all signed up to this, if in doubt, sit them out code. And even badminton players have signed up to it, Badminton Association of Scotland.
Every sport should be signing up to making their game safer from the point of view of head injury.
You mentioned the language, and I think when you put it in stark terms and you see it on the page in the context of head injuries, I think what you're saying really makes sense when we say that bodies were put on the line. What are we saying there? We're saying...
it is a great thing to see somebody get, you know, melded into the pitch and someone walk out over them and stand up afterwards and keep playing. Is that what we're telling our players?
I agree. I mean, it's an incredible language to be using. I would argue maybe that's the thing that has changed. Because the game has become so gladiatorial over the last decade or so, I think the language associated with the heroism and the physicality of the game has just been accepted.
Now, yes, look, the rugby authorities and to a certain extent GAA and football, soccer, have taken into account you know, the concussion problem, right? Somebody gets knocked down, gets knocked out, gets up confused, dizzy, they're removed from the pitch. And I think they have done a lot. Now, I would prefer if they all had the same guidance.
They all have different guidance, which drives me crazy. There's no reason why each code should have a different set of guidance. But let's say for argument's sake, they're taking that at least seriously. What we have found with my colleagues in Trinity College and research is that it's the sub-concussive blows, the multiple blows that the person is getting in any one game.
So, you know, to give you an example, when we look at some of the players we looked at, now these were retired players. They had been given up playing an average of 12 years since they played their last game. And what we found that they had ongoing brain inflammation. And when we asked them, well, how many concussions did you take? They'd say, oh, maybe six or seven. That's all they remembered.
What we know is that they're taking multiple blows in one individual game. And you don't have to take a direct blow to the head, by the way, to get a concussion. You can get a blow to the stomach and your head goes rocks back and forth. It's the shaking injury, really, that's the main difficulty for the brain's well-being.
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