Chronic traumatic encephalopathy in contact sports: The Canadian experience
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) is suggested to be a progressive neurodegenerative disease, characterized by tau deposits in the depth of cortical sulci in neurons and in glioneuronal complexes around blood vessels. Few studies have suggested that it is caused by multiple concussions or subconcussive brain injuries. A recent publication showed that most American football players whose brain were donated to the Boston University concussion center had CTE (Mez et al. 2017). Over the last 6 years, with the help of neuropathologist colleagues across Canada, we have collected the brains of 33 high level professional and amateur athletes. These include 5 National hockey league (NHL) players, 15 Canadian football league (CFL) players, 3 College football players, 3 College hockey players, 2 professional boxers, 1 professional bull rider, 1 BMX champion, 1 rugby player and 2 skiers. All were male and the ages ranging from 15 to 87 years. Our results indicate that only a small portion of cases have CTE. Moreover, most cases are low stage (stage 1 or 2) and this pathology is mainly seen in some of the younger players. Older players either have no pathological findings or have other neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease. The disparity of results between the 2 groups will be discussed.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".