The NFL commissions a study that finds that…

Alzheimer’s disease or similar memory-related diseases appear to have been diagnosed in the league’s former players vastly more often than in the national population — including a rate of 19 times the normal rate for men ages 30 through 49.

The NFL then responds with…

An N.F.L. spokesman, Greg Aiello, said in an e-mail message that the study did not formally diagnose dementia, that it was subject to shortcomings of telephone surveys and that “there are thousands of retired players who do not have memory problems.”

Two problems here.

1. If you commission a study looking at memory related diseases and it doesn’t formally diagnose dementia and you do it as part of a phone survey, it doesn’t sound like you want your study to find out much of anything.

2. The whole “there are thousands of retired players who do not have memory problems.”kinda sounds like tobacco execs saying ‘well not everybody who smokes gets cancer’.

I don’t think it comes as any surprise that getting repeatedly hit in the head by some of the biggest and strongest men on the planet isn’t the greatest thing for the brain…..but apparently the NFL isn’t buying it yet. The NFL does a much better job in dealing with concussions than they have, but dragging their feet of this is pretty sad.