National Football League
Are Sports Organizations Playing a Role in America’s Obesity Problem?
Posted on by Dr. Francis Collins
Last September, the National Football League struck a deal with Frito-Lay that allowed the company to produce limited-edition bags of Tostitos tortilla chips, with each package bearing the logo of one of 19 featured NFL teams. Several months earlier, Major League Baseball announced that Nathan’s Famous would be its first-ever official hot dog. Now the first-ever comprehensive analysis of such food and beverage sponsorships by major sports organizations shows just how pervasive these deals are. The confusing messages they send about physical fitness and healthy eating habits can’t be helping our national problem with obesity [1].
Among the 10 sports organizations that young viewers watch most, from the NFL to Little League, the NIH-funded research team identified dozens of sponsors and hundreds of associated advertisements promoting food and beverage products. The vast majority of those ads touted unhealthy items, including chips, candies, sodas, and other foods high in fat, sodium, or sugar, and low in nutritional value.
Those findings are especially concerning in light of the latest figures from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES), co-supported by NIH [2], It shows that, despite long-standing public health efforts to curb the obesity epidemic, more than 18 percent of young people in America remain obese. Among adults, the picture is even more discouraging: nearly 40 percent of American adults were obese in 2015-2016, up from about 34 percent in 2007-2008.
Brain Imaging: Tackling Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy
Posted on by Dr. Francis Collins
Caption: Left to right, brain PET scans of healthy control; former NFL player with suspected chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE); and person with Alzheimer’s disease (AD). Areas with highest levels of abnormal tau protein appear red/yellow; medium, green; and lowest, blue.
Credit: Adapted from Barrio et al., PNAS
If you follow the National Football League (NFL), you may have heard some former players describe their struggles with a type of traumatic brain injury called chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE). Known to be associated with repeated, hard blows to the head, this neurodegenerative disorder can diminish the ability to think critically, slow motor skills, and lead to volatile, even suicidal, mood swings. What’s doubly frustrating to both patients and physicians is that CTE has only been possible to diagnose conclusively after death (via autopsy) because it’s indistinguishable from many other brain conditions with current imaging methods.
But help might be starting to move out of the backfield toward the goal line of more accurate diagnosis. In findings published in the journal PNAS [1], NIH-supported scientists from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and the University of Chicago report they’ve made some progress toward imaging CTE in living people. Following up on their preliminary work published in 2013 [2], the researchers used a specially developed radioactive tracer that lights up a neural protein, called tau, known to deposit in certain areas of the brain in individuals with CTE. They used this approach on PET scans of the brains of 14 former NFL players suspected of having CTE, generating maps of tau distribution throughout various regions of the brain.
