By: Drew Edwards
Former Ticat linebacker Leo Ezerins gets headaches. He has some memory loss. He’s 55 now, so maybe it’s just the onset of age, an inevitable part of getting older.
Or maybe it has something to do with 10 seasons he spent smashing into people as a player in the Canadian Football League.
“I’ve had a lot of concussions, three I remember very distinctly,” says Ezerins, who recalls one big collision in particular. “I couldn’t figure out the entrance from the locker-room onto the field, and I didn’t remember the entire game after that hit.”
With the shocking suicide of former NFL linebacker Junior Seau this week, the issue of concussions and their long-term effects is once again front and centre. Seau, who played 19 seasons and 268 games, struggled with depression after he retired in 2009. He reportedly shot himself in the chest so his brain could be examined for signs of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a progressive degenerative disease that has been diagnosed in a number of former football players.
But for thousands of players like Ezerins, a post-mortem diagnosis does nothing to help them with the issues they are facing in the here and now. That’s why Ezerins has agreed to participate in a $25 million University of Toronto study that will examine the living brains of 20 former CFL players with a history of multiple concussions, and compare them with 20 players without a history of head injury. A further group of 20 without football experience will be part of a control group.
The study is being led by Dr. Charles Tator, a neurosurgeon at Toronto Western Hospital, the founder of the safety group ThinkFirst Canada and renowned expert on the subject of concussions. He said that this new research is aimed at discovering both the cause and possible treatments for the devastating effects of CTE.
“We’re not just interested in the end result, which is what we see at autopsy; but we want to discover the events leading up to the degeneration,” Tator said. “The object is to determine why this happens to some players, but not others and what we can do about it.”
The multidisciplinary study will involve several physicians at the Toronto Western Hospital and the Toronto Rehabilitation Institute. It will incorporate neurophysiological testing aimed at measuring memory and response time, a clinical neurological examination and the use of magnetic resonance imaging or MRIs.
Dr. Robin Green, whose lab will handle much of testing, says that players who are having problems as a result of multiple concussions suffered during their playing careers will also get treatment.
“We have the potential here, if we can understand what’s going on, to dramatically improve recovery from brain injury.” Green said. “The study has the potential of helping anyone who has sustained multiple concussions.”
Though the league is not part of this study, Tator has partnered with the CFL before. He was part of the concussion awareness project, launched in the spring 2011, which brought together the league, the players’ association, alumni, and representatives from Football Canada, Canadian Interuniversity Sport and the Canadian School Sport Federation. The groups joined forces to create “concussion flyers and posters,” which they distributed to more than 100,000 minor football players, 3,200 high schools and 52 universities.
At the same time, league also announced it was partnering with Tator in a study that would perform post-mortem tests on former CFL players to look for signs of CTE, similar to groundbreaking Boston University research that has found the disease in dozens of former football and hockey players. To date, Tator has examined the brains of six players and found CTE in three of them.
The problem, says Tator, is that the league hasn’t given a single dollar to the CTE research or the new study.
“So far, zero,” Tator says of the league’s contribution. “We’d like them to follow the path of the NFL, which has given the Boston University group a million dollars. So I’d like the CFL to at least give us something.”
With the high-cost of MRIs and the technical expertise required to interpret them (routine scans don’t show concussions), Tator said the new research will take more than two years to complete and cost upwards of $25 million. They’ve been able to acquire enough funding to get started via a grant from a physician-funded medical foundation. But Tator said he’d also like to see private individuals, like Toronto Argonauts owner and Hamilton businessman David Braley, step up.
“It would be great if people like David Braley and the other owners made a significant contribution,” Tator said. “It’s in their best interest to look into this, to preserve the brains of their best assets and to keep people wanting to play.”
An avid hockey fan, Tator said it’s not his intention to drive people away from sports, which he believes are vital to long-term heath.
“We don’t want to turn people away from playing football and hockey, we want to give the hockey moms and the football dads some reassurance that they are looking after their kids,” he said.
Ezerins says his motivations are broader than just his own health and those of his fellow alumni. He points out that concussions are an issue that affects a wide swath of society, from car accident victims to those injured in the workplace, to the elderly who have experienced a fall. And he’s adamant that suing the league — as a number of former players in the U.S. have done — is not part of his agenda.
But he’s also hoping for answers to his own troubling questions.
“One of the things I want to do through this study is evaluate whether what I’m going through is just a natural part of aging, or is it a result of concussions? If it is because of concussions, then what can we do about it?
TORONTO — He was a devastating blocker who routinely drove opposing defenders into the ground. But Warren Hudson will also be remembered as someone who never kicked a fellow player when he was down.
