I’m a 27 year old male and have been worrying a lot about CTE/early dementia a lot recently, especially since it’s in the news so often and I’ve seen in family members how horrible dementia is. I’ve hit my head like everyone else, but I distinctly remember these incidents:
-Hitting my head on the ground when sledding in the snow when I was very young and getting sick after. I was brought to the doctor the next day, but was not diagnosed with a concussion.
-A basketball falling onto my head years later during a game.
-Hitting my head on a solid wood beam in my friend’s room because I’m tall.
-Falling onto my face onto the mats (2 inches thick) twice from standing doing Brazilian Jiu Jitsu recently. I felt fine after both of these falls, but I fell hard. I considered going to the doctor after, but didn’t really have any symptoms after.
I feel like I can’t bring this up with any of my friends because I have some that have been knocked unconscious several times or sustained repeated hits to the head for years playing football. Or they’ll bring up how their infant hits them in the face multiple times a week. I never played football, boxing, rugby, ice hockey, or any of the riskier sports, but CTE is still in the back of my mind. I want to keep practicing Jiu Jitsu, but even though concussions are extremely rare and some people I know have not seen one in a decade of training, it is an extremely close contact sport and sometimes people get hit with elbows and knees in the face by accident.