ADELAIDE, Australia (AP) — The Australian Sports Brain Bank diagnosed a former Australian Football League Women’s player with chronic traumatic encephalopathy in what local media has reported as the first case involving a female professional athlete.
The Australian Broadcasting Corp. said former Adelaide premiership winning player Heather Anderson, who died by suicide last year at the age of 28, had been diagnosed with the degenerative brain disease linked to concussions.
The Australian Sports Brain Bank, established in 2018, diagnosed Anderson as having had low-stage CTE and three lesions in her brain, the ABC reported.
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CTE, which can only be diagnosed posthumously, can cause memory loss, depression and violent mood swings in athletes, combat veterans and others who sustain repeated head trauma.
Michael Buckland, director of the Australian Sports Brain Bank, on Tuesday told the ABC’s 7.30 program that the diagnosis was a step toward understanding the impact of years of playing contact sport has on women’s brains.
“While we’ve been finding CTE in males for quite some time, I think this is really the tip of the iceberg and it’s a real red flag that now women are participating (in contact sport) just as men are, that we are going to start seeing more and more CTE cases in women,” Buckland said.
Buckland co-authored a report on his findings with neurologist Alan Pearce.
“Despite the fact that we know that women have greater rates of concussion, we haven’t actually got any long-term evidence until now,” Pearce said. “So this is a highly significant case study.”
Anderson had at least one diagnosed concussion while playing eight games during Adelaide’s premiership-winning AFLW season in 2017. She retired from the game because of a shoulder injury before returning to work as an army medic.
Anderson’s father, Brian Anderson, said the diagnosis was “a surprise but not a surprise”.
“Now that this report has been published, I’m sort of trying to think about how it might play out for female sportspeople everywhere,” he told the ABC.
There’s been growing awareness and research into CTE in sports since 2013, when the National Football League in the United States settled lawsuits — at a cost at the time of $765 million — from thousands of former players who developed dementia or other concussion-related health problems.
In March, a class action was launched in Victoria state’s Supreme Court on behalf of Australian rules footballers who have sustained concussion-related injuries while playing or preparing for professional games in the national league since 1985.
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