Giving Compass' Take:

• FiveThirtyEight reports on a recent analysis from epidemiologists that took what we know about chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) in NFL players who died and attempted to extrapolate it to a wider statistical group.

• What might this analysis tell us about brain injury in general? How could funders support research in this area?

• This piece helps debunks ten myths about the brain.

Over the past few years, the NFL has been haunted by the early deaths of some former players whose brains showed signs of chronic traumatic encephalopathy. CTE is a neurodegenerative disease characterized by memory loss, mood disorders, dementia and other brain-related problems. But how prevalent is CTE, and how likely are players to develop it? Those remain unanswered questions, despite ongoing attempts to answer them.

A paper published last year in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that among 111 brains from NFL players donated to a brain bank created to study the long-term effects of repetitive head trauma, 110 had CTE. Sounds bad. But as alarming as those numbers seem, they really can’t tell us much about the actual risk of CTE among football players, nor can they reveal how common the condition is among people who’ve played the game. If you wanted to know the true prevalence of CTE among NFL players, you’d have to check the entire population of NFL players for CTE. That’s impossible because right now, CTE can be definitively diagnosed only by looking at the brain post-mortem. And the the brains that were examined for the JAMA study didn’t end up in the brain bank by chance — they were donated, for the most part, because the deceased’s next of kin suspected he might have had CTE.

Read the full article about trying to understand CTE by Christie Aschwanden at FiveThirtyEight.