A late football player’s death after suffering from an NFL brain injury has been linked with symptoms of ALS due to CTE.

CTE, or chronic traumatic encephalopathy, is a progressive degenerative disease caused by severe and/or repeated blows to the head—a common occurrence for football players.

CTE has been linked with the onset of ALS symptoms for some time, but one CTE expert, Dr. Ann McKee, notes that the late Kevin Turner’s NFL brain injury presents perhaps the best evidence so far of this connection.

Kevin Turner, who spent 25 years as a fullback, eight of which were in the NFL, began developing the degenerative nerve disease ALS at age 39. He died several years later, at age 46.

The repeated NFL head injury led to his brain being “riddled with CTE,” shrinking it and damaging nerve cells, causing ALS symptoms, said McKee.

NFL players who suffer an NFL brain injury are much more likely to develop ALS than others. Indeed, NFL players develop ALS at four times the rate of other people, so the connection between NFL brain injury and ALS symptoms has been well known for years.

According to McKee, the late football player’s NFL brain injury showed the “best circumstantial evidence we will ever get that this ALS type of motor neuron disease is caused by CTE.”

The message McKee urges people to get from this finding is that “this is unacceptable. We have to eradicate this. It’s a totally preventable disease. Let’s start preventing it.”

NFL Brain Injury Lawsuits

A group of retired football players who have suffered from an NFL brain injury filed a lawsuit against the NFL, leading to a recent settlement that could award injured players up to $5 million.

According to the lawsuit, NFL brain injury can lead to a variety of neurological and cognitive impairments, including:

• Alzheimer’s Disease
• Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS)/Lou Gehrig’s Disease
• Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE)
• Dementia
• Memory loss
• Parkinson’s Disease

Nearly 5,000 former players for the NFL were included in this NFL brain injury lawsuit.

The lawsuit initially involved 73 retired NFL players who had suffered from an NFL brain injury during their career. The class action lawsuit claimed that the NFL failed to adequately protect its players from the known risks involved with repeated head injuries, and even concealed the extent of these risks from players.

Since the initial lawsuit, hundreds of similar lawsuits were filed by retired NFL players with an NFL brain injury. Because of their similarities, the lawsuits were consolidated into a single NFL concussion MDL, or multidistrict litigation.

The judge, Anita B. Brody also certified a class of all living retired NFL players with head injuries who retired prior to July 7, 2014.

Beyond the simple monetary rewards, Judge Brody also approved a $75 million Baseline Assessment Program to provide eligible retired players with free assessments of their neurological functioning.

If you are one of the retired NFL players who have suffered from an NFL brain injury that may have led to neurological or cognitive damage like CTE or ALS, you may be eligible to receive the settlement money and benefits made available through this litigation.