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by Kay Lazar
Boston GLobe
February 2, 2010
There was the nasty concussion Ben Price suffered from an eighth-grade skiing accident. Then the countless jarrings from wrestling and baseball. By senior year, he was plagued by nagging headaches after football practices at Wayland High School.
His mother, Wendy Price, did not connect the incidents until a chance conversation last year with another parent at a youth soccer game. That parent, Dr. Ann McKee, is studying a form of early dementia that was once thought to develop primarily in boxers. Now McKee and her colleagues think the disease may be silently destroying the brains of athletes in a variety of sports after years of repetitive blows to the head.
"You don't know who is going to be the unlucky one,'' said Price, who asked McKee to speak at a forum in Wayland.
The turnout - 200 parents, coaches, and students attended - was a sign of the success of the nation's first center to study chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE. Created by McKee and three partners 17 months ago at Boston University Medical School, the center has quickly spread awareness about the dangers of repetitive head injuries, largely by targeting the National Football League.
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