Pennsylvania Personal Injury Blog

The New York Times reported that former NHL player Reggie Fleming, who played for the Flyers among five other teams and died in July, had brain damage due to repeated head trauma. According to an article in the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Times said that this links hockey for the first time to a condition usually found in boxers.

Fleming, who spent 12 seasons in the NHL, was found by Boston University researchers to have had Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, a disease that causes cognitive decline, behavioral abnormalities and ultimately dementia. Fleming is the first hockey player known to have been tested for the disease, which was also found in several former NFL players recently.
A neuropathologist at Boston University who also diagnosed CTE in the former football players, told the New York times that repetitive head injuries can have very serious long-term consequences, regardless of how you get them.

According to the Centers for Disease Control, an estimated 300,000 sports-related traumatic brain injuries (TBIs) of mild to moderate severity (1), most of which can be classified as concussions (i.e., conditions of temporarily altered mental status as a result of head trauma), occur in the United States each year. The proportion of these concussions that are repeat injuries is unknown; however, there is an increased risk for subsequent TBI among persons who have had at least one previous TBI (2,3). Repeated mild brain injuries occurring over an extended period (i.e., months or years) can result in cumulative neurologic and cognitive deficits (4,5), but repeated mild brain injuries occurring within a short period (i.e., hours, days, or weeks) can be catastrophic or fatal. The latter phenomenon, termed “second impact syndrome.”