Is CTE a new disease?

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CTE is not a new disease. CTE is the same thing as what had been referred to as “punch drunk syndrome,” a term first used in 1928 in a paper by Dr. Harrison Martland in the Journal of the American Medical Association to describe the long-term problems former professional boxers had. It was similarly referred to as “dementia pugilistica” (the dementia of fighters) starting in the 1930s. Although some people think that CTE is a newly discovered disease or a newly coined term, it has, in fact, been used in the medical and scientific literature since the 1940s and 1950s, when it was used as a more general (and more scientific) term for “punch drunk” because it wasn’t seen only in boxers. However, it was not until the 1970s that the actual changes in the brains of CTE patients (through postmortem neuropathological examination) were first described in the scientific literature. CTE became better known to the public when, in 2002, it was found through postmortem brain examination of a well-known former NFL player, Mike Webster, who died at age 50 from a heart attack after years of significant memory decline and behavioral change. It has only been since 2009 or 2010 that the scientific and medical literature has shown a tremendous increase in research on CTE.