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For every year of absorbing the pounding and head collisions that come with playing tackle football, a person's risk of developing chronic traumatic encephalopathy or CTE increases by 30 percent.
These new findings are from an analysis of 266 deceased former amateur and professional football players, and it included dozens of brains of former football players who did not have CTE.
This was a control group that provided enough data for the researchers to be confident in their discovery that there is a strong relationship between CTE risk and the number of years a person plays football.