September 5, 2026

@michaelokun

What resonates with me about this study is that it moves the CTE conversation from symptoms recalled after death toward something far more rigorous: detailed neuropsychological testing performed during life lined up with what was actually found in the brain at autopsy. In 33 former NFL players with autopsy-confirmed CTE, the clearest pattern was impairment in learning and memory (63%), followed by executive function (52%) and language (41%), while visuospatial function was relatively preserved; importantly, greater p-tau burden tracked with worse learning and memory. What I find particularly compelling is that this pattern largely persisted even after removing cases with Alzheimer’s and other tauopathies, strengthening the possibility that we are beginning to see a recognizable cognitive fingerprint of CTE itself. We are not yet at a point where a neuropsychological profile can diagnose CTE in a living person, and this was a small, selected autopsy cohort, but connecting objective symptoms during life to verified pathology after death is exactly the kind of bridge we need if we hope to eventually diagnose CTE accurately before death. https://cutt.ly/LykT2EWg