The NFL reportedly pulled a $16 million grant it gave the Federation for the National Institutes of Health to fund a $30 million study on the brain disease CTE and its link to football. However, the NFL has called the report inaccurate.
Sources close to the project told ESPN’s Outside The Lines that the NFL was apprehensive about the study when they learned that the study would be done by a group led by Boston University researcher Dr. Robert Stern. BU did announce on Tuesday that the FNIH would pay for the study, but didn’t mention the league.
“ESPN story is not accurate,” NFL spokesman Brian McCarthy tweeted. “NFL did not pull any funding. NIH makes its own decisions.”
The FNIH released its own statement on the situation, saying that the NFL was willing to contribute to Stern’s study. However, “NIH made the decision to fund this study in its entirety and to issue a Request for Applications (RFA) early next year to support an additional study on CTE using funds from SHRP [Sports and Health Research Program], which will double the support for research in this area,” the statement reads.
According to the New York Times, the new study is set to look at how cases of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) can be diagnosed while a patient is still alive. The degenerative brain disease has been linked to repeated hits to the head while playing sports. At the moment, the only way to diagnose the disease is after a patient is dead and if the family has donated the patient’s brain to research. The hope is to figure out why some players are diagnosed, while others are not.