Media Spotlight Shines on Brain Injuries In the NFL

Concussions have plagued the National Football League for decades, but there may have never been a time when the problem of brain injuries suffered in practices and in games has been more on display than right now. Several major media outlets are closely monitoring the problem and reporting on the way brain injuries often affect football players long after their playing days are done.

The latest example came Sunday night on 60 Minutes, when former New England Patriots linebacker Ted Johnson told 60 Minutes correspondent Bob Simon that his concussions were so severe that he often couldn't see straight -- and yet he'd keep playing, because that's what's expected in the NFL.

"Lot of times, if I didn't get my vision back before the next snap, I'd have to have another linebacker call the plays. I couldn't see on the sideline. I couldn't see my defensive coordinator signaling in 'cause my vision was still blurred," Johnson said on 60 Minutes.

Concussions are also a focus of a new piece in the New Yorker by Malcolm Gladwell, who writes that while concussions are a serious problem, an overlooked problem in football is that hits can cause brain damage even when they don't result in a concussion:

Much of the attention in the football world, in the past few years, has been on concussions-on diagnosing, managing, and preventing them-and on figuring out how many concussions a player can have before he should call it quits. But a football player's real issue isn't simply with repetitive concussive trauma. It is, as the concussion specialist Robert Cantu argues, with repetitive subconcussive trauma. It's not just the handful of big hits that matter. It's lots of little hits, too.

And the New York Times has reported extensively on the long-term affects on the brain of a football career, including a story about a recent study finding that former NFL players in their 30s and 40s are 19 times as likely to suffer from Alzheimer's disease or similar memory-related diseases as the general population.

The fact that football players expose themselves to the risk of brain damage is certainly not breaking news. But an intense media spotlight on the subject is long overdue.