Stabler, who died of colon cancer at age 69 on July 8, had requested that his brain be examined for the illness after Junior Seau committed suicide in 2012.
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Kramer, who just turned 80, said he is on the lookout for symptoms that have attacked his friends and former teammates.
“We witnessed his struggles throughout my life”, she said.
“There were days when I walked in the door and looked at his face, and I could tell”, (Stabler’s partner Kim) Bush said. “And it was, in fact, rattling”. “It intensified (over the last several years)”.
On a scale of 1 to 4, Stabler had high Stage 3 chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, the degenerative brain disease believed to be caused by repeated blows to the head, according to researchers at Boston University.
Stabler is the first Super Bowl winning quarterback to have been confirmed to have CTE in news that continues to prove that all positions of the sport present a risk of permanent brain injury. But that’s no panacea, especially not for someone who played as long as he did.
“They try to improve the safety of the player with no hitting above the shoulders, no helmet to helmet, no targeting”, Plunkett said.
“You play because you love the game”, Atkinson said.
The discovery of the disease by a Pittsburgh doctor working with cases of former National Football League players was featured in the recently-released Will Smith film “Concussion”.
The Times reported that “well over” 100 NFL players died with some form of CTE, including seven members of the Pro Football Hall of Fame. We don’t know the rate at which CTE develops, or the mechanism.
“He wanted to do whatever he could to help protect football players of the future”, Bush said. (We don’t know if it has symptoms-correlation is not causation.) We don’t know if there’s treatment.
The brain tissue of people found to have CTE shows an abnormal buildup of tau, a protein that can, when it leaves cells can disable neural pathways that control memory, judgment and fear.
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The sad – though not especially startling – news led to some awkward conversations Wednesday between reporters and players, both of whom would have rather been talking about the matchups between the Denver Broncos and Carolina Panthers. Dr. Bennett Omalu, who discovered CTE and was profiled in the movie, told ABC News this week that he is nearly certain that former Buffalo Bills star O.J. Simpson suffers from CTE and that this most likely influences his behavior.
