By SHANNON O. WELLS
Pitt’s National Sports Brain Bank (NSBB) — which tracks and studies the cognitive function of former contact-sports athletes who pledge to donate their brains after they die — has seen a recent spike in participants following the announcement that a beloved former Pittsburgh TV broadcaster has agreed to take part.
Of the approximately 190 NSBB registrations since the program was announced in May 2023, around 90 of those joined since Pittsburgh’s KDKA-TV aired a feature on retired on-air host and former University of Tennessee football player Jon Burnett, on Feb. 12, said Julia Kofler, director of Pitt’s Division of Neuropathology and co-director of the Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center.
“We are now at around 190 registrations in, and those with registrations of people who make the initial contact, then there’s a several-step process until somebody finally signs consent,” she told University Times on March 5. While Kofler can’t definitively say how many have given consent, she confirmed the NSBB has 190 registrations and “about 90 of those happened after the Jon Burnett story.”
Burnett, whose 36 years as a KDKA weather forecaster included co-hosting the “Evening Magazine” and “Pittsburgh Today Live” shows, shared his story alongside members of his family with KDKA’s Kristine Sorenson, one of Burnett’s former colleagues, on Feb. 22. The Post-Gazette followed with its own feature story on Burnett and his family.
Retired since 2019, Burnett shared with KDKA that the memory loss and changes in how he walks and moves led him to sign up with the NSBB.
Kofler said the attention Burnett’s story has brought to the Brain Bank’s mission exemplifies the “power of human connections, like having a face to this story, somebody that people recognize, that they connect with,” she said. “They see with their own eyes that he looks different now than he used to, and they watched him on TV. And it’s also an example of somebody else doing it that they trust.”
As KDKA reported, Burnett was known for being game to get involved in feature stories he covered, which led to adventures like rappelling down a high-rise building, driving a Jeep over boulders and racing on Big Wheel toy cycles.
Through he retired at age 65, Burnett’s health challenges weren’t widely known until his decision to join the NSBB. The program provides those who participated in a wide range of contact sports and activities, with or without degenerative symptoms, with long-term observational studies — including longitudinal, years-long examinations of individuals’ medical, behavioral and mental health.
Burnett joins local luminaries including former Steelers running backs Jerome Bettis and Merril Hoge who, with Joseph Maroon, a Pitt School of Medicine neurosurgeon, and Regis Haid, past president of the American Association of Neurological Surgeons, pledged participation during a May 18, 2023, news conference at the Petersen Events Center. Maroon and Haid had both played Division 1 contact sports.
While donating is not limited to those who experienced a known concussion or who exhibit degenerative symptoms, at-risk athletes from sports including football, hockey, soccer, boxing and wrestling are invited to donate, as well as those who took part in such concussion-prone activities as cheerleading, equestrian sports and motocross.
An NSBB team led by Kofler will regularly evaluate participants throughout their lives. After a patient dies, neuropathological examinations of their brain will look for evidence of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), Alzheimer’s disease, Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerlosis (ALS or Lou Gehrig’s disease) and other neurodegenerative conditions.
Emphasizing that CTE is “not something you can diagnose in a living person,” but only through an autopsy, Kofler said the wide range of NSBB participants suggests there’s “no typical case … There’s a lot of variety. So we get people from very young adults to advanced ages. We get about two-thirds male and one-third women (from) a number of different sports. The majority of them are actually asymptomatic.”
As to a definitive statement that head injuries from playing football and other contact sports are inherent precursors to CTE, Kofler’s message is “we don’t know enough yet.”
“There may be some people that are vulnerable to getting the pathology,” she said. “We don’t know yet. If you have CTE pathology, how much of that is truly responsible for any symptoms that person may experience? I think there’s a lot of interplay with mental health issues, and also later in life with concurrent neurodegenerative diseases. So it’s really difficult to tease apart.”
While some recent data suggest that, for example, Alzheimer’s disease is a bigger contributor to persistent cognitive decline than concurrent CTE pathology, Kofler said there’s “still so much we need to learn, and especially what makes one person vulnerable to getting a pathology and being symptomatic from it and the person next door who played maybe as much football, and is now in his 80s and completely fine, at least clinically.”
A growing problem, she added, is CTE being portrayed “very much as a black-and-white situation in the public” as a fatal disease. “And if you have played football and you have any kind of symptoms, people self-diagnose them with CTE and make some sort of very unfortunate decisions,” such as committing suicide, without seeking health care “and maybe treating diseases that may mimic what they perceive as CTE, like depression or sleep disorders or other things.”
Pleased as she is about the recent uptick in NSBB participation, Kofler said she’s “aiming much higher” and wants to get into the “thousands” of participants.
“So that’s something we’re still very far away from. But it also allowed us to really sort of fine-tune our processes and make sure everything works to our satisfaction,” she said. “So we really like right now, working on many different directions and expanding our recruitment.”
Shannon O. Wells is a writer for the University Times. Reach him at shannonw@pitt.edu.
Have a story idea or news to share? Share it with the University Times.