Australian researchers have identified the first case of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) in a female athlete.
The brain injury has been commonly found in American football players and other contact sport athletes, but the discovery of the condition in a female athlete is a first.
Heather Anderson was an Australian rules football player who died by suicide last year at 28. An analysis of her brain found that she had early stage CTE, caused by repeated head trauma.
“There were multiple CTE lesions as well as abnormalities nearly everywhere I looked in her cortex,” researcher Michael Buckland, director of the Australian Brain Sports Bank, told The Washington Post. “It was indistinguishable from the dozens of male cases I’ve seen.”
Her family donated her brain to the researchers in order to learn more about her death. Scientific literature is inconclusive on the relationship between CTE and suicidality, however the condition is known to cause memory issues, personality changes and erratic behavior.
Anderson retired from Australian rules football, a contact sport similar to rugby, after a career-ending shoulder injury in 2017. Her father described the CTE diagnosis as “a surprise but not a surprise,” in an interview with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
The research, published Tuesday in the journal Springer, notes that a few women have been diagnosed with CTE before, but never an athlete. The research says that the low number of female diagnoses is likely because the sports where CTE is best known, American football and boxing, are male-dominated.
CTE worsens as athletes suffer more head injuries and in longer careers. The condition can only be diagnosed posthumously via an autopsy.
Researchers said that athletes that start playing contact sports young are at the greatest risk of CTE. Anderson began playing Australian rules football at 5 years old, her family said.
Women are also more susceptible to concussions than men, raising their risk for the condition, researchers said.
“There has been a significant increase in women’s participation in contact sports over the past decade … This report may, thus, represent a sentinel case: as the representation of women in professional contact sports is growing, it seems likely that more CTE cases will be identified in female athletes,” the study states.
The most notable CTE cases are American football players. Famed Chargers linebacker Junior Seau was diagnosed with the condition after dying by suicide in 2012, as was Patriots tight end Aaron Hernandez, whose brain resembled that of a 60-year-old when he died by suicide at 27.
Nearly 350 American football players, 90 percent of those studied, have been posthumously diagnosed with CTE.
