Pugilist Dementia

Pugilist Dementia

I have been preaching that contact sports are BAD for you for some time now…even while teaching a combat applicable activity. Let’s face it Karat is not a NO contact activity but it pays a great deal of respect to self-control and control over techniques that can cause a lot of damage. I have also had a lot of students and juniors jump over to more contact oriented sports like Thai boxing and boxing or even more contact oriented Karate styles and while they are having fun, I do warn them a bit about the down falls of getting hit in the melon over and over again…even with protective gear!

Before someone gets upset I am also warning parents about contact sports that have little to do with combat; like Hockey, football and even wrestling. Some of my biggest worries are with bone and soft tissue injuries that lead to permanent damage and injuries that effect the growth of students that partake in these activities. But as of late one thing keeps popping up and as more and more research is done and comes in we have a set of much more destructive issues to keep in mind.

One of the scariest things that have been making news as of late are Dementia Pugilista or DP. It sound rather scary, and for good reason.

DP is a type of neurodegenerative disease classified as Dementia that affects athletes that participate in contact sports that have a lot of high impact blows delivered to the head or the body over all that affect the brain in a whiplash type injury. One way to identify if your sport has a good chance of leading to this issue is if you read a lot about athletes in your sport that suffer from Concussions a lot. The old term for this was Chronic Traumatic Brain injury’s associated with boxing or CTBI-B, or Punch Drunk Syndrome (Punchy).

We used to make fun of the boxers and how slow they were when they got older, kind of like everyone became Rocky or something. But it has been found that 15-20% of amateur boxers will suffer from the condition and it begins to show up 12-16 years after they start their career. Sadly, it’s a major reason that professional boxers have to end their careers early as well.

The condition is not just caused by strikes that land and cause concussions, actually its cased more from strikes that are at the “sub concussive” range or strikes that are landed repeatedly over time that do not cause major knock outs or concussions but build up damage over time.

Because of the damage being found there is a large movement from the medical field to ban the sport in youth and even take it out of the Olympics all together. This means the most prestigious amateur event that includes boxing will no longer be an available for boxers.

So, what causes DP, Loss of neurons, scarring of the brain tissue, alterations of the corpus callosum and other damage to the cerebellum are all implicated in the syndrome. The damage that causes these changes are all related to repeated mild to severe impact injuries and in all the events recorded extended training in impact sports were cited as being reason for this injury and DP to be present.

Some of the actual physical manifestations of this disease are dementia, declining mental ability, problems with memory, parkinsonism, speech problems and explosive behavioral changes that manifest as pathological jealousy, paranoia and rage issues. And in most cases the individual with this type of syndrome are described as “punchy” or “slow”.

Treatments for this disorder are prophylactic in nature only. This means they serve to help mask symptoms and wont reverse them. The use of drugs used in Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s has proven to assist but not reverse the symptoms.

So why are we just hearing about this issue now…I have no idea. DP was first described back in 1928 by a forensic Pathologist in New Jersey, and again in 1973 when more and more post mortems were done on boxers who suffered with this disorder. The 1973 study used the brains of 15 retired boxers to try and trace a reason for the disorder. The findings concluded that the repeated blows to the head of a boxer cause changes to the brain make up that lead to this disorder and they are irreversible over time. This means that if you stop boxing, even at an early age, the damage that is done…is not going to go away!

Some of the most famous boxers who were found to have suffered from DP are Flyd Patterson, Freddie Roach, Sugar Ray Robinson, Joe Frazier and Muhammad Ali. Now Ali has been diagnosed with Parkinsons, but many feel, including his neurologist that boxing lead to him having this disease as he has no family history of anyone else suffering from this type of neurological disorder.

It is important to also state that a study was done at the Boson University School of Medicine found that when autopsies were done on 11 professional American football players all 11 also showed signs of DP and in one amateur foot ball players case, after a post suicide autopsy was done, he also suffered from depression and paranoia caused by DP. And two professional wrestlers that were Autopsied also had CTE or DP, Chris Benoit and Andrew Martin…Both were done after the wrestlers tragically killed themselves.

DP or CTE are horrible injuries that effect a person physically, mentally and emotionally. It is very important to understand the mechanism and the results of participating in a impact sport that causes repeated injuries to the brain.

A lot of students go off and train at kick boxing clubs and have a great time. They don’t think much of the future and they get beat up a lot training with these clubs. Not everyone is going to suffer from DP because they get punched in the head..but if you had the choice to gamble between taking a art that will relieve stress, help you keep fit, enjoy yourself and one that does all this but might cause you to lose control of your body, become very forgetful, feel paranoid and maybe even at an extreme case kill yourself or those you love because you are paranoid and depressed…what would you put your time into?