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(EMAILWIRE.COM, February 08, 2012 ) Philadelphia, PA -- For 17-year-old Nathan Stiles, his senior year was supposed to be the best year; instead, it ended up his last.
Stiles, a straight-A student and star running back of his high school football team in Spring Hill, Kan., was the son every mother dreams of having.
Unfortunately, the final game of his senior year was the final game of his life. Stiles died doing what he loved - playing football. His autopsy revealed that he died of a second-impact syndrome, a condition that occurs when a player is hit before the brain has had time to recover from an initial concussion. Brain injuries can be common in athletes who play high-contact sports.
These repeated hits on the field would also make him the youngest reported case of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE). CTE is a degenerative brain disease that is common in football players and other athletes who participate in high-impact sports who get repeated blows to the head.
Although Stiles had been experiencing headaches earlier in the year, he was given a clean bill of health, after doctors kept him off the field for three weeks. When he returned to play, he got hit again, but said that he was okay even though his mother, Connie Stiles, remembers Nathan as stunned and not quite right. Because he didn't seem plagued by headaches, Stiles appeared to be normal.
During his last game, he did wonderfully during the first half, says his mother. However, after halftime, he began to walk and act strangely. His mother was called down to the bench, but it was too late. Stiles had collapsed on the sidelines. He was rushed to the hospital, but at 4 a.m. the following day, he died.
Shortly after he died, his parents received a phone call from the Boston University Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy (CSTE) Brain Bank. The center wanted to study Stiles's brain to better understand what happens to athletes who are hit repeatedly, by looking inside the brain.
The Brain Bank has the world's largest collection of brains, and since its inception in 2008, the center has acquired and documented over 50 cases of CTE. The bank's director and neuropathologist, Dr. Ann McKee, M.D., does much of the research.
McKee says that athletes who have died from second-impact syndrome and have signs of CTE have brains that look boxers who lived into their 70s, even though these victims of brain injury are only 40 or 50-years-old. She was shocked to see a 17-year-old brain that looked the same way, and to her, it was a call to action.
She explains that those who have suffered from CTE have Tau proteins which are the same proteins that are found in the brains of Alzheimer's patients.
If you or a loved one has suffered a traumatic brain injury, or a TBI, please visit LegalView at http://www.legalview.com/ for a free legal consultation.
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