Compromise Reigns at Summit on Concussions

ROSEMONT, Ill., June 19 -- They sat shoulder-to-shoulder on a dais in a hotel conference room, the dissenting minds on concussion research together at last. For months these doctors exchanged occasional harsh words and tongue-clucking critiques of each other's thoughts on the long-term effects of concussions and the merits of the NFL's policy.

But when they got together under the lights of a news conference at the NFL's concussion summit Tuesday, the bickering stopped.

"The more you sit with these people, you see how you share the same opinions even though each person has been presented as a polar opposite," said Mark Lovell, the founder of the sports medicine concussion program at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. "The difference is that in the scientific community, what we have are cordial scientific disagreements that can appear to be over-exaggerated if it is outside the community.

"We disagree with each other all the time. That's part of science. It's just not usually in the media."

It had gotten bad. Many of the members of the NFL's mild traumatic brain injury committee have been publicly skeptical of new concussion research. And in turn they have been attacked as being unreceptive to new science by the outside doctors. Yet Tuesday, each side seemed willing to accept the other's work.

For instance, Julian Bailes, the chairman of the neurosurgery department at West Virginia University, has been taken by the research of Bennett Omalu, a Pittsburgh area forensic pathologist. Omalu has studied the brains of four dead NFL players who played in Pennsylvania -- Mike Webster, Andre Waters, Terry Long and Justin Strzelczyk -- and has discovered dead neurons that are often found in boxers who had severe head trauma. It may be the first evidence to show that football concussions might lead to dementia in players after retirement.

But Joseph Maroon, a professor of neurosurgery at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center and also the Steelers' team neurosurgeon, seemed less sure of the connection than Bailes. With Bailes sitting nearby, he ran through a list of other possibilities for the dead neurons that include steroids, drug abuse, amphetamines and even rat poison and antifreeze, which Long used to kill himself.

Rather than snap a defense, Bailes nodded ruefully and said, "I agree we don't know the exact cause."

And Maroon, in the spirit of conciliation, said Omalu's research had brought important data to light that needed to be examined more.

Some tension did simmer in the privacy of the doctors' presentations, which were closed to reporters. Much of the contention came over Omalu's research, which many on the league's concussion committees question as incomplete and needing a control sample of non-athletes for comparison.

But even with the occasional spats, most of the doctors seemed to agree that the discussion was helpful and the exchange of opinions was a good thing.

As they left the conference, many of the doctors who have been critical of the league seemed to have a sense of guarded optimism that the NFL took the event seriously. Each team was required to send a team doctor and two trainers, and attendees were given a giant folder filled with concussion research.