Bennet Omalu
ID: 7932525
Chronic traumatic encephalopathy, the neurodegenerative disease linked to football, was successfully identified for the first time in the brain of a living person, Dr. Bennet Omalu told ESPN Thursday. Omalu was recently portrayed by Will Smith in the film “Concussion.”
Omalu, the neuropathologist who first discovered CTE in the brain of a former football player, said results of testing done on former Vikings linebacker Frank McNeill while he was alive were “very similar” to what was found in an autopsy after McNeill’s November 2015 death.
McNeill was a participant in a UCLA study of 14 former NFL players to develop methods of identifying CTE in people while they are alive.