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When CTE Fears Keep Former Football Players From Addressing Treatable Conditions
Mood, memory or behavior changes may have causes other than chronic traumatic encephalopathy that respond to medical care
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Key takeaways
- Chronic traumatic encephalopathy can only be confirmed after death, so mood, memory or behavior changes cannot establish that a living person has the disease.
- Depression, anxiety, sleep apnea, hypertension and other treatable conditions may cause similar symptoms in midlife and older adults, making a medical evaluation important.
- Even men who played football as children, or in high school or college, could be vulnerable, researchers say.
About 15 years ago, John Sinnott, a former NFL offensive tackle, was in his mid-50s, struggling with mood swings, unpredictable bursts of anger and memory problems. Research about former football players and their risk of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) had just begun to gain traction in the news media and among researchers.
Sinnott was terrified, certain his symptoms signaled the onset of CTE, a degenerative brain disease often characterized by aggression, impulsive behaviors and cognitive deficits.
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“It was a very scary period,” says Sinnott, who lives in Mattapoisett, Massachusetts. “My emotions were all over the place. I would blow up. I was having trouble remembering things, finding the words.”
He wondered whether he was paying a terrible price for years of countless blows to the head during youth and college football at Brown University, followed by four seasons in the NFL in the 1980s. He played first with the St. Louis Cardinals, then the New York Giants and later the Baltimore Colts, until a career-ending back injury. During those years, Sinnott, now 68, took repeated hits and had many concussions.
In those days, “You would go to the sidelines, they would give you smelling salts and send you back,” he says.
Finally, his wife insisted he see a doctor. “Who knows what I might have done if I hadn’t listened to her?” he says.
The last NFL team John Sinnott played for was the Baltimore Colts. He was number 79. In his mid-50s, he worried that some scary symptoms were due to an untreatable CTE, but it turned out treatments did help.
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To his immense relief, he was diagnosed with depression, hypertension, anxiety and sleep apnea — all treatable. Today he feels fine. “I’m in a really good place right now,” he says. “I want other players to know they can be there too.”
He has a message for his retired NFL colleagues — and for the millions of men who played football at any age: What happened to him could easily be mistaken for CTE, and they should seek medical help if they are worried about symptoms.
CTE can be diagnosed only with a brain autopsy after death, and there are no effective treatments, so former players with symptoms might fear the worst (many do) and don’t act upon their fears. But Sinnott and neurologists who study CTE say athletes should not be afraid to seek medical help.
Many symptoms that resemble CTE don’t stem from CTE — and respond to treatment, eliminating unnecessary anxiety.
Latest studies show CTE impact
New, disturbing findings about the extent of CTE among former NFL players have people paying attention. Two studies published in 2026 estimate that the prevalence of CTE in this population is “alarmingly high,” says Dr. Daniel Daneshvar, director of the HealthSpan Lab at Mass General Brigham in Massachusetts and a coauthor of both papers.
The first paper, published in the BMJ, analyzed several hundred former players’ brains after death and concluded that the bounds of CTE among players could range from 25 percent to 98 percent. The more recent paper, in JAMA Network Open, projects the likely figure at 75 percent.
Neuroscientist Christopher Nowinski, a coauthor of both studies and cofounder and CEO of the nonprofit Concussion & CTE Foundation, points out that players can have CTE pathology — brain evidence of the disorder — without having symptoms. “The prevalence of this is dramatically higher than people want it to be,” he says. “As the disease progresses, it causes progressive symptoms in most.”
Nowinski played football in college and has since lost two teammates to CTE. He later turned to wrestling, where a 2003 kick to the chin resulted in a concussion and ended his athletic career, prompting him to seek medical help — and start the foundation.
“I’d be a fool not to consider CTE a possibility [in myself],” says Nowinski, 47.
Making football safer
Even men who played football as children, or in high school or college, could be vulnerable, especially since the NFL’s recently introduced safety protocols have not been extended to amateur play, researchers say.
No one expects football or any other contact sport to go away, researchers say, stressing that the benefits of physical exercise outweigh the risks. The goal should be to make the practices and games safer.
“I played sports, including football and wrestling, in college, and these sports taught me about teamwork, discipline and leadership,” Daneshvar says. “So it’s not a choice between whether to play sports or not but how we can make sports safer by eliminating unnecessary hits to the head.”
Almost 70 percent of head impacts occur during practice, he says, “and at the professional level, there is less than one contact practice per week. If all the college and high school and youth teams practiced like the pros, we could eliminate the majority of head impacts and almost certainly reduce the rate of CTE. It’s the cumulative hits.”
Nowinski agrees. “I’d prioritize CTE education and tracking and limiting the number of hits versus just the number of days [of contact practice].” He goes on: “It’s also important to tell people that if you aren’t symptomatic, you shouldn’t worry about it too much.”
Many symptoms are treatable
Other scientists, while acknowledging the risk of CTE from repetitive head injuries is real, point out that it’s not inevitable. They note that many disorders linked to head injuries, such as depression, produce symptoms that mimic CTE but are treatable, unlike CTE.
“My biggest concern is that former athletes have an unrecognized and untreated health condition that is being falsely linked by some players, doctors and scientists to CTE,” says Dr. David Okonkwo, professor of neurological surgery and director of the Neurotrauma Clinical Trials Center at the University of Pittsburgh, who is studying the health of former football players.
“We see so many different health conditions that they developed in their post-playing days, and the overwhelming majority we find in our clinical assessments are treatable,” he says. He’s referring to depression, anxiety, sleep apnea and dementia-like symptoms that could result from other causes, such as medications, diabetes and high blood pressure.
For that reason, he urges former athletes with health concerns to seek medical attention from physicians who are aware that many conditions could be misdiagnosed as CTE and should attempt to treat them. “In our experience, almost all of them have a treatable condition and are suffering unnecessarily,” Okonkwo says.
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Rachel Grashow, coinvestigator of Family Experiences Managing Football Lives for Harvard University’s Football Players Health Study, agrees. The study collects data from an estimated 5,000 former players about their health and other experiences through biennial surveys and has also compiled a checklist of recommended medical tests for former players to request from their doctors.
The findings suggest that many treatable conditions, such as those Sinnott experienced, are common among retired players. “Left untreated, they can lead to more serious brain disorders later in life,” Grashow says. And many are wrongly assumed to be CTE.
With depression, for example, “what a lot of people don’t understand is that depression manifests in men as rage,” she says. “Men are not allowed to be sad, so when these men are experiencing rage and moodiness, they and their family and their doctor may jump to CTE.”
One former player “said to me he had a gun on the table and was going to take his own life” until he began thinking about his family, Grashow recalls. Instead, he went to the doctor and found out “he had zero testosterone,” she says. After starting replacement therapy “he felt like himself again.”
She acknowledges that players may have underlying CTE pathology, “but we don’t know, and they don’t know,” she says. “They can’t go back and change their head injuries, but they can go after these conditions and treat them. We hear anecdotally that men are scared to go to the doctor because they're afraid they might have CTE when they have something treatable.”
Charlie Batch, 51, a former quarterback who played 15 seasons in the NFL for the Detroit Lions and the Pittsburgh Steelers from 1998 to 2012, says he experienced several concussions. He is now a Pittsburgh broadcast sports analyst. Batch suffered an inoperable fracture to a bone in his ear during his final game, when he was tackled to the ground and his head hit the turf hard. He still copes with migraines, ringing in his ears and light sensitivity. He wants other players to take advantage of medical resources available to them, as he has done.
“You’re always going to be worried,” says Batch, who began playing football when he was 7 and is a participant in the Harvard study. “Football is a physical game, but if you think there is a problem, there are medical resources available. There are still a lot of players who don’t know that.”
CTE and tau tangles
Like Alzheimer’s disease, CTE is characterized by abnormal tangles of tau, a naturally occurring protein. But, unlike Alzheimer’s, where tau is found inside neurons (nerve cells), tau tangles in CTE are located next to blood vessels in the shallow grooves in the cerebral cortex called cortical sulci. Current brain imaging techniques can’t detect them.
Also, science has not yet identified biomarkers or genes that can predispose or diagnose CTE in the living, nor are there drugs to treat the disease.
But researchers are working on it. Daneshvar, Okonkwo and others are studying living former players — research that involves creating a data bank from comprehensive health assessments, brain imaging, cognitive testing, and blood and cerebral spinal fluid analysis, as well as screening for other health conditions, such as hypertension, anxiety, sleep disorders, depression and dementias that may be unrelated to CTE.
Some scientists are also studying experimental “radiotracers” with the hope of finding a marker that can zero in on — and highlight — CTE tau in the brains of living patients using PET scans.
“The goal is to make a definitive [CTE] diagnosis while they are still alive,” Daneshvar says.
Ken Jenkins, 67, of Bowie, Maryland, was a running back for most of his five seasons in the NFL in the 1980s, playing for the Philadelphia Eagles, the Detroit Lions and the then Washington Redskins. He carried the ball “that everybody wanted, so people wanted to get me down on the ground,” says Jenkins, who started playing when he was 9.
CTE is “my number one concern,” he says. “As I age I wonder, when I can’t find my keys, whether I’m having symptoms or is it just me aging?” he says. “It’s always the first question I ask myself if I have looked at my calendar three times and still can’t remember what my 3 p.m. appointment is.”
Jenkins and Batch cope with the uncertainty by focusing on the present. They also participate in research, follow the science and stay connected to their medical team to monitor their health. Batch also launched a nonprofit to support school-age kids in his hometown of Homestead, Pennsylvania.
“You have to control the things that you can control and pay attention to the science as it matures,” Jenkins says.
Sinnott agrees. “If you’d asked me 15 years ago, I’d say, ‘I’m scared.’ You’re always thinking about it. Everything you do wrong, you blame on CTE. But you can’t live that way. You can’t spend your life worrying about something that may never happen. You just need to live your best life.”
If you are experiencing mental health struggles or emotional distress, call or text 988, the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline.
The key takeaways were created with the assistance of generative AI. An AARP editor reviewed and refined the content for accuracy and clarity.
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