Mental Block: Football Star Struggles With Brain Injury

Toward the end of his pro football career, Dave Herman would often wake up the morning after a game and not remember which team hed played against, much less the score. When his son would ask him what had happened in the previous days game, Herman wouldnt have a ready answer.

Id say, Give me the paper and well find out, Herman remembers. Id have some recollection, but not of the score or who had a great game.

Even the highlight of his career, 1969s Super Bowl III, in which he played a major role helping the New York Jets pull off one of the greatest upsets in football history, is a blur. I dont remember the end of the game, says the 73-year-old former offensive lineman, whose tenacious blocking enabled quarterback Joe Namath to engineer the stunning victory over the Colts. I remember reading about it because that was a huge, huge game.

Not until decades later did these and other lapses lead Herman into the midst of research on and debate about a degenerative neurologic disease called chronic traumatic encephalopathy.

For years Herman thought the game-related episodes of amnesia were benign, just his normal. But as he got older he began to develop problems with his short-term memory. His wife, Roma, started noticing how, during dinner with friends, hed often repeat questions theyd answered before.

Roma thought he might be developing Alzheimers disease, and eventually she and Dave went to Mount Sinai Medical Center hoping to get him enrolled in a clinical trial testing therapies for the disease.

But when a panel of doctors at the center evaluated Herman, they couldnt agree on the diagnosis. Two brain injury experts thought that Hermans innumerable hard hits to the head might have sparked CTE.

Five experts who focus on memory disorders couldnt agree on whether it was Alzheimers, says Dr. Sam Gandy, a professor of neurology and psychiatry and director of the Center for Cognitive Health and NFL Neurological Care at the Mount Sinai Medical Center.

Gandy figured that one way to differentiate between the diseases was to scan Herman for the presence of beta-amyloid, the sticky protein that gunks up the brains of Alzheimers patients. While the brains of some players found to have CTE have spots of beta-amyloid, many have no trace of it. Their symptoms are caused by the accumulation of another protein, called tau.

A PET scan showed no signs of beta-amyloid, which meant that Herman didnt have Alzheimers.

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Mental Block: Football Star Struggles With Brain Injury