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Park Avenue gunman Shane Tamura made a point of claiming that it was CTE, or chronic neural encephalopathy, that caused him to kill four people before turning the gun on himself Monday. Tamura drove from Las Vegas to New York and alleged in a rambling note found on him that he developed the neural disorder from playing football. Medical examiners will now look at Tamura’s brain to see if he even had the injury in the first place. That news immediately had people speculating about a link between head injuries and violent behavior. Chris Nowinski is the CEO and co-founder of the Concussion Legacy Foundation, a group that studies CTE’s and their effects on the brain. He appeared on 710 WOR’s Mendte in the Morning program to discuss the possibility of a CTE leading someone to become a mass shooter.
Nowinski told host Larry Mendte that the common misconception is that there is a tie between the number of concussions and CTE. “It is tied to traumatic brain injuries, but we published a study to help people understand this, where we highlighted a different study that showed that for everyone one concussion I might have suffered in college, I had 340 hits that were harder than that concussion. What we understand is that I could not feel one neuron dying, and so those hard hits are probably causing microscopically what we call sub-clinical traumatic brain injury… and so it’s years of play, which is a proxy for hard hits, number and strength of hits, that is driving this.”
Nowinski also suggested having CTE does not automatically cause one to commit violent acts. “We’ve also seen these happen where people’s brains were ‘normal.’ CTE is not going to cause an act, but it is going to make you more likely to have abnormal behaviors. In the absence of that person’s brain being studied, the assumption is that he just had some psychosis, and it may have nothing to do with CTE and he just focused on the CTE as part of the psychosis. That’s one option. But another option is that he did have traumatic brain injuries through playing sports and it did change him.”
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