re: This is really, really bad for the NFL

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Not really. Former NFL players who have led normal post-football lives die all the time from other causes. It would probably not take much convincing to get a few families to consent to autopsy.

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You need more than a few to get statistical significance and you'd need to have good evaluations of their neurological function before death as well IMO

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Besides, my point was that unless you know that those players who live normal lives after football DO NOT have evidence of CTE, how can they definitively say CTE is the cause of these other post-football problems?

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You don't show causality in the way you seem to suggest. Not everyone who smokes dies of lung cancer. Not everyone who eats a bad diet and doesn't exercise dies of heart disease.

Presumably not everyone who plays football will develop CTE eventually. But if playing football (or hockey or boxing) causes CTE is a large number of people who play football, hockey, or box then it would still be the cause of neurological disability or death in those people.