Former New England Patriot and convicted murderer Aaron Hernandez had the degenerative brain disease chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), Boston University researchers announced Thursday.
Also on Thursday, Hernandez's family announced they were suing the Patriots and the NFL. The lawsuit alleges that the league and the team knew the dangers of CTE, and still failed to protect players like Hernandez, and that contributed to Hernandez's death.
Hernandez killed himself in prison earlier this year. He was 27 and serving a life sentence for murdering Odin Lloyd in 2013.
Brain researcher Dr. Dan Daneshvar and the Boston researchers have tied CTE to hits in football. Daneshvar says Hernandez's CTE was just below the most severe stage, which is stage four.
"Certainly getting something this severe — stage three disease in a person in their 20s," Daneshvar said, "is quite remarkable."
Daneshvar says no cause and effect relationship can be drawn between any particular behavior and CTE. He cited the results of a paper he was a lead author on that looked at the largest number of brains of former football players yet studied.
"So while we know that individuals with CTE tended to have impulse control problems, that individuals with severe CTE tended to have issues such as suicidality," Daneshvar said, "we can't directly say that someone's brain pathology is related to the actions they took."
The NFL recently agreed to pay $1 billion to retired players who claimed it misled them about the dangers of playing football.
Daneshvar says that memory problems and problems making decisions are common in people with the type of severe CTE that Hernandez had.
"This is something that is, I think, noteworthy when we think about Mr. Hernandez and some of the issues that he was struggling with," Daneshvar said. "Again, we can't necessarily say how an individual person might respond to a brain disease. But what we can say is, that given what we've seen clinically in CTE, it certainly wouldn't help."
The NFL and the Patriots had no comment on the lawsuit filed by Hernandez's family.
