When Australian Rules footballer Heather Anderson died by suicide last year (in 2022), her family donated her brain to the Australian Sports Brain Bank, hoping to better understand her death. Because of that, a team of Australian researchers recently said that they’ve made the world’s first diagnosis of chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, in a professional female athlete. As research into CTE linked to contact sports continues to grow, this has led to calls for better concussion protocols to protect players in these various sports. To find out more about CTE as well as the gender disparity in research, we speak to Assoc Prof Dr Michael Buckland. He’s a neuropathologist as well as the founder and director of the Australian Sports Brain Bank. 

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