The broken promises of the NFL concussion settlement
When Chuck Arrobio’s memory began to falter, he seemed like an ideal candidate for one of the more innovative benefits of the NFL’s landmark concussion settlement.
A Minnesota Viking for just one season, 1966, Arrobio worked for decades after football as a dentist. But before he retired in 2016, he displayed alarming signs of cognitive decline.
On a few occasions, Arrobio’s assistants narrowly prevented him from filling the wrong tooth or numbing the wrong side of a patient’s mouth.
A neuropsychologist diagnosed Arrobio with dementia in 2017, his medical records show, and speculated the cause was chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, the brain disease linked to football.
The devastating news came with some consolation: The NFL’s concussion settlement, years in the making, had finally taken effect, promising care and payments into the millions for former players suffering from dementia and CTE.
At his settlement evaluation, his medical records show, Arrobio didn’t know what season it was or what city he was in.
But despite his obvious symptoms, he failed to qualify for money or league-funded treatment.
Perhaps, a settlement neuropsychologist suggested, Arrobio was just dealing with a mood disorder related to his retirement.
Six months later, Arrobio died of heart failure at 73. An autopsy found CTE that had caused atrophy — tissue death so extensive that portions of his brain had shrunk, a telltale sign of most diseases that cause dementia.
A routine brain MRI exam probably could have detected the atrophy, according to five experts in neuroscience.
But the settlement’s evaluation didn’t include MRIs in 2017, nor does it today.
When the NFL agreed to settle lawsuits filed by thousands of former players alleging football left them with brain disease, the top lawyer for players promised a “state of the art” evaluation, paid for by the league, that would quickly connect players with care at the critical early stages of dementia, when treatment can help ease a patient’s suffering.
“It’s the best of the best,” Christopher Seeger, one of the nation’s leading class action attorneys, said in June 2017 at a meeting with former players.
But the settlement’s dementia evaluation was operating behind best practices the day it opened in 2017, a Washington Post investigation found.
And the quality gap between the settlement’s evaluation and a state-of-the-art examination for dementia has only widened since, leaving thousands of former players with assessments that fall far short of the sophistication promised by their top lawyer……
Former New Orleans Saints and Philadelphia Eagles linebacker Vaughan Johnson failed to qualify in 2019, even though doctors outside the settlement had diagnosed him with dementia.
When he died that December, an autopsy found CTE with atrophy — brain damage that experts said could have been detected via MRI…….
https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2024/08/20/nfl-concussion-settlement-mri-alzheimer/