Why do some people suffer repeated concussions with no lingering ill effects while others face early dementia, or struggle with basic brain functions, mental health or substance abuse? Ontario Sport Minister Neil Lumsden, a star CFL fullback and running back in the 1970s and 1980s who was named to the league’s Hall of Fame in 2014, says he will donate his brain to research into traumatic brain injuries to help find answers. “Just not today,” he quipped Wednesday, putting a light touch on a serious subject that is increasingly becoming a focus in the medical community amid what Concussion Legacy Foundation Canada executive director Tim Fleiszer called a “brain-injury crisis.” It goes far beyond athletes to victims of intimate partner violence and automobile crashes, soldiers and first responders injured in the line of duty, schoolchildren and anyone who takes a hard blow to the head. Fleiszer said concussions are “under-reported, underrecognized and under-diagnosed,” pointing to the need to increase awareness of prevention and treatment. Debate over concussions in sports has spiked in the week since Miami Dolphins quarterback Tua Tagovailoa — whose quarterback brother Taulia was signed by the CFL’s Hamilton Tiger Cats in June — suffered the fourth serious concussion of his career in a game against the Buffalo Bills, resulting in calls from some experts for him to retire for the sake of his health. Lumsden’s donation pledge to the foundation highlights groundbreaking research underway at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) to discover insights into the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of chronic traumatic encephalopathy or CTE, a neurodegenerative disease linked to repeated head injuries. To that end, Fleiszer — a former CFL player with four Grey Cups to his name who, like Lumsden, has also suffered concussions with no lingering impacts to date — had a positron emission tomography (PET) scan of his brain in June, becoming the first living subject for the study. “It’s the first-of-its-kind research in the world, the first in human trials,” Fleiszer said at a news conference with Lumsden on the spongy artificial turf at the University of Toronto’s Varsity Stadium. “There are too many of my friends, former teammates, that are already in our brain bank,” he added in an interview. “What they’re first looking at is healthy ‘control’ subjects — so, guys that have had cumulative head trauma but are asymptomatic — and trying to figure out what’s the difference between them and the ones with symptoms.” In addition, a 12-month study of concussions headed by CAMH psychiatric epidemiologist Jesse Young will look at statistics from across Ontario to develop what he called “a framework for prevention” and get a better sense of the size of the concussion problem. Lumsden, who has coached youth football and hockey, urged other provinces to pass legislation like Rowan’s Law in Ontario, which was approved in 2018 under the previous Liberal government. Named after Ottawa-area teen Rowan Stringer, who died of injuries she suffered playing rugby, the bill requires training for coaches, players and their families, a system to track injuries and codes of conduct for sports leagues and school boards to avoid concussions. Rowan’s Law followed recommendations from an inquest into the 17-year-old’s 2013 death. Lumsden said it “makes me crazy” when he sees adults on bikes without helmets, or without their helmets fastened, and children without helmets despite Ontario law requiring helmets for anyone under 18 years of age.
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