Bobby Hull's false teeth may be one of the strangest items coveted by memorabilia collectors wanting insight into the lives of hockey heroes. Charles Tator is after something far more intimate: their brains.
The neurosurgeon is leading a team of researchers at Toronto Western Hospital who are asking NHL and other competitive hockey players to donate their brains after their deaths for a new research project aimed at understanding the long-term effects of concussions.
Researchers at the new Krembil Neuroscience Centre sports concussion project will be the first in Canada to search the brains of dead hockey players for the same signs of severe damage recently discovered in the brains of American football players, and normally associated with boxers.
Their work is part of a revolution in the scientific understanding of concussions. In recent years, researchers have gained critical new insights into how the injuries affect athletes' brains, both in the immediate aftermath of a hit – and possibly long after they've retired from the sport.
It is sobering science that is affecting not just professional athletes.
Researchers in the Toronto area are now following minor hockey teams and doing brain scans of kids who suffer concussions. They want to determine if the guidelines for treating children should be different from those for adults. In North Carolina, scientists are trying to understand why college-age females who play hockey experience more concussions than their male counterparts, and whether younger girls are also more vulnerable.
At Boston University, neurologist Ann McKee and her colleagues are analyzing a brain of a deceased National Hockey League player in a study that is raising the disturbing prospect of a link between sports that are hard on the head and an Alzheimer's-like condition associated with personality changes and dementia.
They are looking for a highly unusual buildup of a protein that clogs and kills the brain cells of people with Alzheimer's disease. A distinctive pattern of damage has been found in the brains of former athletes who played sports in which they experienced frequent blows to the head.
Dr. McKee wants to see at least 50 cases before she draws any firm conclusions, and so far has analyzed 17 brains of former athletes. She has several more she is still working on, including the brain of the former NHL player. Most of the brains come from athletes who had been retired for some time, but one was from an 18-year-old who had played football and showed the same characteristic damage.
That case startled researchers who study concussions.
“It is scary,” says Kevin Guskiewicz, who runs the sports concussion research program at the University of North Carolina.
There is very little data on how concussions affect children, say University of Toronto's Michelle Keightley and her colleague, Nick Reed. They are working with 10 Toronto-area hockey teams, both girls and boys from the ages of 10 to 14. They are doing baseline brain scans of the players, and will do another one with any children who get a concussion.
Two of the teams are wearing sensors in their helmets this season. This allows researchers to track the number, magnitude and location of any head impacts.
It is a similar approach used by Dr. Guskiewicz in North Carolina, who has found that teenagers playing minor hockey regularly take hits to the head that are as hard as those experienced by college football linemen.
He and his colleagues put sensors inside the helmets of 13- to 15-year-old hockey players, and compared the results with the university football team he monitored in the same way.
Data from thousands of hits measured on the ice and gridiron revealed the force of the head shots were similar. The collegiate football players were bigger and stronger than the minor hockey players, but they didn't move as fast.
Hockey can be as hard on the head as football, Dr. Guskiewicz says. His work with the college football players also suggests that it may not be just the highlight-reel hits that are dangerous: Small hits after a couple of big ones can also trigger concussions.
