History has been made this week as researchers have announced former Australian rules football player Heather Anderson has been diagnosed with chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) in the first known case of the degenerative brain disease in a professional female athlete.
Anderson played seven games for Adelaide in the Australian Football League Women’s back in 2017 and just retired last year. She would commit suicide last November at the age of 28. Her brain was donated to researchers by her family in the aftermath.
Following an autopsy, researchers said Anderson met the criteria for low-stage CTE after discovering three lesions on her brain, something abnormal for someone her age.
“She is the first female athlete diagnosed with CTE, but she will not be the last,” the authors of the paper wrote.
Anderson’s father, Brian, said the diagnosis was “a surprise, but not a surprise”.
“Now that this report has been published, I’m sort of trying to think about how it might play out for female sportspeople everywhere,” Brian Anderson told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. “Suicide, it’s a tough one, it’s a tough way to see your child die, it’s tough to see your child die anyway.
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“But suicide causes you to re-examine everything, to look at every interaction.”
Anderson also played rugby league during her contact sports career.
ASBB director Michael Buckland added there were “multiple CTE lesions as well as abnormalities nearly everywhere I looked in her cortex.”
“It was indistinguishable from the dozens of male cases I’ve seen,” he added.
Chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) is a degenerative brain disease that can only be determined by an autopsy. It is associated with dementia, mood changes, and aggression.
Back in 2017, it was revealed that former Patriots tight end Aaron Hernandez suffered the most severe case of chronic traumatic encephalopathy ever discovered in a person his age. Hernandez, just 27 when he hanged himself with a bedsheet, was riddled with Stage 3 CTE.
