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One of the major problems with Chronic Traumatic Encephelopathy research comes from the current inability to diagnose it in a patient who is still alive. That could be coming.

Dr. Robert Stern, who has been instrumental to CTE research in recent years, tells Peter King of TheMMQB.com, “We will be able to accurately diagnose CTE during a person’s life, perhaps in the next five to 10 years.”

It was Dr. Stern’s potential involvement in an effort to diagnose CTE for living patients that has created a dust-up between the NFL and Congress, with four members of the House of Representatives recently pressing the league for details regarding a decision to pull a $30 million “unrestricted gift” from the National Institutes of Health. The league reportedly yanked the funding after the NIH rejected the NFL’s claim that Dr. Stern is biased and that his selection to run a $16 million study aimed at developing a lifetime CTE diagnosis was clouded by a conflict of interest.

While it’s still not known what it means to have CTE, a device for spotting it could prompt plenty of football players to stop playing football at the NFL level and at lower levels of the sport. Which could be the spark that results in the first tangible reduction in the supply of football players.

Regardless, the more that football players (and other athletes) and their parents know about the risks and realities, the better. As long as those risks and realities are presented and digested in a fair, rational way, with more research regarding what it means to have CTE.