Bang to rights

FRED McNEILL, an American-football player, died in November at the age of 63. Between 1974 and 1985 he appeared for the Minnesota Vikings. After leaving them he became a lawyer but in later years suffered from dementia and was told that he had signs of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a degenerative brain disease. His recent death has become a milestone in the understanding of brain disorders, for post-mortem examination has confirmed this diagnosis—retrospectively making him the first person to be so diagnosed while alive.

CTE is the physical manifestation in the brain of punch-drunk syndrome—or dementia pugilistica, to give its Latinised, medical name. As that name suggests, this form of dementia particularly affects boxers, who are hit on the head as a matter of course. But doctors now understand that it is also a problem in people like Mr McNeill, who get hit on the head accidentally in contact sports. Mr McNeill, along with several other retired players, volunteered to let researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) use a scanning technique called positron-emission tomography (PET) to look at their brains.