NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman wrote the response to pseudo-scientific cranks in Congress that needed to come from Roger Goodell’s Remington-Rand five years ago.

“The science regarding CTE [chronic traumatic encephalopathy], including on the asserted ‘link’ to concussions that you reference, remains nascent, particularly with respect to what causes CTE and whether it can be diagnosed by specific clinical symptoms,” Bettman wrote Sentaor Richard Blumenthal. “In 2012, it was the consensus on medical experts on concussions in sports, including Dr. Robert Cantu (the primary expert retained by the players’ counsel in concussion litigation currently pending against the NHL, and a member of Boston University’s CTE Center) that a causal link between concussions and CTE has not been demonstrated.”

That remains true today. Researchers continue to create headlines by hyping individual case studies on famous players’ brains. But they fail to create any body of data establishing causation for CTE or its prevalence in athletic populations vis a vis society at large. A randomized study on CTE remains but an idea. Left with anecdotes, politicians and the press confuse speculation for science. They reach conclusions before a single study can examine the question.

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