played a lot of football
http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/...nsons-diseases

I am not surprised. This sports is really hard on the body. It is no wonder Muhammed Ali has Parkinson's. It's for the same reason.

Oh great, now they tell me! That's ok though all that money bought me chicks and happiness for a few years.

https://www.michaeljfox.org/foundation/news-detail.php?nfl-$30mm-NIH-research

Debi

Thanks soccertese for bringing this to our attention.

The newspaper report was based on a paper by Lehman et al. [1].

The key statistics are:
334 retirees had died, of whom
7 had Dementia/AD
7 had ALS
3 had PD
We note how small the numbers are.

The issue is how these numbers compare with those expected. The measure given in the paper is the standardized mortality ratio (SMR). For PD as a contributing cause of death the SMR was 1.60 with a 95% confidence interval of 0.35 to 4.94. The confidence interval stradles 1. So, the authors, quite rightly, make no claim that playing in the NFL increases the incidence of PD.

References

[1] "Neurodegenerative causes of death among retired National Football League players"
Neurology; Published online before print September 5, 2012;
Everett J. Lehman, Misty J. Hein, Sherry L. Baron, et al.
http://www.neurology.org/content/ear....full.pdf+html

John