The data on contact sport, concussion and CTE is convincing. But not conclusive

September 10, 2026 — 7:30pm

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The International Sport Concussion Conference was held in Melbourne earlier this week, in the days preceding the first regular-season NFL game played on Australian soil.

During Tuesday’s session, research figures from the Australian Sports Brain Bank were presented. Of the first 150 brains of participants in contact sport examined by the bank, 51 belonged to men who had a reported history of playing rugby league. Thirty-one of those 51 carried the pathological signature of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE).

Rugby league players both amateur and professional; men who died in their 20s, 30s and 40s. Among them Paul Green, an NRL premiership-winning coach who died by suicide at 49, and the Manly Sea Eagles player Keith Titmuss, who was 20 when he collapsed after a training session and died of heat stroke. Rightly, those numbers can’t be ignored and are cause for concern, if not alarm.

Temper your musings, however. The findings of the NSW Deputy State Coroner, handed down in 2024, were that Titmuss died of exertional heat stroke. He might have had CTE pathology at the time of his death, but it says nothing about why he died.

The finding is invoked as a marker of exposure and a portent, which isn’t an illegitimate scientific use. But it’s not a finding that he died of CTE, or that the pathology affected his function, or that it would have. He is, strictly, a case of dying with. Like the 102-year-old man who dies with prostate cancer, but not because of it.

Repeated blows to the head appear to cause this CTE pathology. In brain banks replete with the brains of people who weren’t former collision and combat sport participants, the pathology is rarer. A study conducted a........

© The Sydney Morning Herald