The game of football has increasingly been linked to chronic traumatic encephalopathy, better known as CTE, which is a progressive brain disease associated with repeated traumatic brain injuries.
It has largely been linked to strictly male professional athletes, but the first female athlete has officially been diagnosed with the disease after the autopsy results came back on Tuesday.
Former Australian rules football player Heather Anderson had a long history of contact sports. According to CBC, she played Australian rules football from age five, including seven games in the women’s version of the Australian Football League in 2017. She was also an Australian Army soldier for nine years.
Anderson tragically took her own life last November at only the age of 28. Following her death, Anderson’s family donated her brain to the Australian Sports Brain Bank, which led to this discovery earlier this week.
The findings of her autopsy were published in Springer Medical Journal, which detailed that Anderson’s brain fulfilled current diagnostic criteria for low-stage CTE.
“She is the first female athlete diagnosed with CTE, but she will not be the last,” the authors of the paper wrote via ESPN.
Many around the sports world offered their opinion of this eye-opening diagnosis of Anderson’s brain.
A female pro athlete has been diagnosed with chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, for the first time.
CTE, linked to repeated brain trauma, was posthumously diagnosed in Australian rules football player Heather Anderson, who was 28 when she died in November. https://t.co/K6uDZvlRCf— Rick Westhead (@rwesthead) July 4, 2023
“Australian scientists say they have made the world's first diagnosis of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) in a professional female athlete. The diagnosis was made on the brain of Heather Anderson, an Australian Rules footballer who took her own life last year aged 28.” https://t.co/FHb6ifwtzE
— Katie Phang (@KatiePhang) July 4, 2023
1M+ 🇦🇺women & girls play contact sport
Females are more likely to suffer concussion at lower impacts with worse outcomes & longer recovery than maleshttps://t.co/vvUlxEx5qI
Females have 20-30%⬆️risk of serious head & neck injury if forced to play contact or collision sport…
— Katherine Deves Morgan 🇦🇺🚺 (@deves_katherine) July 4, 2023
This is of world significance. A female athlete with *one* confirmed diagnosed concussion diagnosed with degenerative brain disease CTE.
AFLW player Heather Anderson the first female athlete to be diagnosed with CTE in landmark casehttps://t.co/Htvkrdmijx
— Erin Delahunty (@della79) July 4, 2023
Anderson’s father issued a statement following the findings, saying that it was “a surprise, but not a surprise” to him that his daughter had CTE.
“Now that this report has been published, I’m sort of trying to think about how it might play out for female sportspeople everywhere,” Brian Anderson told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. “Suicide, it’s a tough one, it’s a tough way to see your child die, it’s tough to see your child die anyway. But suicide causes you to re-examine everything, to look at every interaction.”
It’s obviously incredibly sad news, but it does now offer an opportunity to spread awareness on the disease that can affect all athletes, male and female alike.
