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Please don’t say women athletes are more susceptible to CTE.
The late Heather Anderson, a former Australian soldier and professional football player who committed suicide in 2022, was found to have degenerative brain disease. She is the first woman athlete to have been diagnosed with CTE at age 28.
Anderson began playing Australian rules football at 5 years old and went on to play rugby and at the highest professional level of football for the Adelaide Crows until she retired in 2017 with one known concussion and another suspected by her family.
Her father, Brian, called the suicide “a surprise but not a surprise. And I think that now this report has been published, I’m sort of trying to think how it might play out for female sports people everywhere.”
Chronic traumatic encephalopathy has been discovered in the autopsies of deceased American football players, many of whom spent much of their lifetimes enduring severe traumatic head collisions.
Anderson’s results are published in the Springer Medical Journal, whose researchers said, “She is the first female athlete diagnosed with CTE, but she will not be the last.”
There are no female sports, except for a women’s professional football league in this country, where head-to-head contact is a regular part of the game. Women’s soccer and lacrosse and field hockey are physical in nature, but there are rules that protect the players more than in men’s athletic games.
Such rules differences seem to imply that most women are frailer and more susceptible to injuries, but if their strength and speed continue to improve like the men, they could be more in danger than we think.
Michael Buckland, director of the Australian Sports Brain Bank, said the “multiple lesions and abnormalities” in Anderson’s diagnosis were “indistinguishable from the dozens of male cases” he has seen and called it a significant step in understanding the effects that years of playing contact sports has on women’s brains.
“It is a red flag,” Buckland continued, “that now women are participating in contact sports just as men are that we are going to start seeing more and more CTE cases in women.”
Let it be a warning sign for head trauma researchers and athletic apparel companies that just as much attention must be paid to women as in men’s football, ice hockey and other contact sports moving forward.
Featured image via The Adelaide Advertiser
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