Too Soon To Tell If Football Killed Junior Seau, But That's Not What's Being Reported

Last week, the San Diego County coroner’s office released the results of Seau’s autopsy, which found nothing abnormal with his brain after a surface evaluation. Some outlets jumped the gun and reported that Seau’s brain wasn’t damaged at all after years of playing football (and therefore football didn’t play a role in his suicide), but experts disagree. “That assumption is totally, flagrantly false,” Dr. Robert Cantu, the chief of neurosurgery at Emerson Hospital and a co-director of BU’s Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy, told Wired Playbook. “You cannot make that statement based on the external examination of the brain. You can only make that statement after a microscopic evaluation of the brain is conducted in a specialized lab.”  [Wired]