At least 25% of former NFL players who died from 2016-2021 had CTE, according to new study

A new study of NFL players who had played in at least one of the league’s games and died between 2016-2021 showed at least 25% of them had CTE.

The study from researchers at Mass General Brigham — published Tuesday in The BMI, a prominent medical journal — deepens the link between the head impacts NFL players suffer and chronic traumatic encephalopathy, the degenerative brain disease known as CTE.

“We’ve known that this disease process can be caused by, in part, repeated traumatic brain injury. But we didn’t know how common it was,” said Dr. Daniel Daneshvar, lead author of the study, according to NPR.

The study used brain samples from the UNITE Brain Bank at Boston University, where the brains of more than 330 players who died from 2008-2021 have been donated. Researched tested the brains of 235 of the 878 players who died from 2016-2021 for CTE. They found the disease in 215 of them.

Mood swings, memory loss and confusion are among the symptoms of CTE.