Posted by Michael David Smith on May 3, 2012, 9:38 AM EST 
 
 Boston University’s Center for Traumatic Encephalopathy has studied the brains of many deceased football players and almost always found injuries consistent with repeated blows to the head. Now the Center wants to examine the brain of Junior Seau. 
 
 Peter King reports that the researchers in Boston are attempting to obtain Seau’s brain. 
 
 The death of Seau, who killed himself with a gunshot to the chest, has reminded many of the death of former NFL player Dave Duerson, who also killed himself with a gunshot to the chest and who left a note asking for his brain to be examined to see whether the depression that plagued him late in life could be linked to brain damage he suffered on the football field. The Boston researchers determined that Duerson did, in fact, show signs of Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, a progressive degenerative disease of the brain found in people with a history of repetitive brain trauma. 
 
 One of the rather shocking developments in football over the last couple years has been the way the words “chronic traumatic encephalopathy” have seeped into the lexicon. It’s long been accepted that if you follow football you know that ACL stands for anterior cruciate ligament and MCL stands for medial collateral ligament. Knowing that CTE stands for chronic traumatic encephalopathy feels different, feels like something we can’t just accept as part of the cost of doing business in the NFL. 
 
 If the Boston researchers find that Seau suffered from CTE, and if they believe that CTE precipitated Seau’s suicide, that could be a watershed moment in the way we view the sport, and its effect on those who play it. This is research that should be done, even if it reveals information that makes all of us very uncomfortable about the game we love. ||||| BOSTON (CBS) — The biggest hurdle in the study of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) has been the issue of it only being discoverable in the brain of a deceased patient. That may not be a problem for long. 
 
 Researchers from Boston University’s CTE Center announced Tuesday that they may have found a way to detect CTE in living patients. 
 
 If the method proves to be reliable, testing could seemingly save innumerable athletes — from high school through the professional ranks — from enduring undue head trauma in their lives. 
 
 The BU School of Medicine said that it examined the brains of 23 former college and professional football players, and compared them to the brains of 50 non-athletes with Alzheimer’s disease and 18 non-athletes (as a control group). 
 
 “They observed that [biomarker] CCL11 levels were normal in the brains of the non-athlete controls and non-athletes with Alzheimer’s disease, but were significantly elevated in the brains of individuals with CTE,” the release said. “They then compared the degree of elevation of CCL11 to the number of years those individuals played football and found that there was a positive correlation between the CCL11 levels and the number of years played.” 
 
 Researchers also found the elevated CCL11 levels in deceased patients with CTE to hold true in the cerebrospinal fluid of post-mortem samples. 
 
 The news is a significant step forward, but it’s not yet a fully reliable marker at the moment. As BU explained, more studies are needed to determine “whether increased levels of CCL11 are an early or late finding in the CTE disease process.” 
 
 Still, the development represents a significant step forward in CTE research. Concussions have dominated discussions surrounding the NFL over the past decade, including last week, when researchers announced that CTE had been found in Aaron Hernandez after he committed suicide in a Massachusetts prison. Hernandez joined a list with Junior Seau, Ken Stabler, Jovan Belcher, Chris Henry, Mike Webster, Frank Gifford, Dave Duerson, Justin Strzelczyk and several more former NFL players in whose brains CTE was found after their deaths. 
 
 But the potential impact of this development could potentially reach millions of athletes in a variety of sports who have suffered varying levels of brain trauma. 
 
 “The findings of this study are the early steps toward identifying CTE during life,” said Dr. Ann McKee, director of BU’s CTE Center and chief of neuropathology at the VA Boston Healthcare System. “Once we can successfully diagnose CTE in living individuals, we will be much closer to discovering treatments for those who suffer from it.”
– Did Junior Seau have football-related brain damage? The Boston University Center for Traumatic Encephalopathy wants to look at his brain to find out, Peter King reports on Twitter today. The Center has studied the brains of a number of deceased football players, and almost every time it's found evidence of repeated head trauma, according to Pro Football Talk, which suspects that a Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy diagnosis on Seau would be a "watershed moment." As if to underscore the news, more than 100 ex-NFL players today jumped onto a lawsuit against the NFL alleging that it "repeatedly refuted the connection between concussions and brain injury," and failed to "take reasonable steps necessary to protect players" from them, CNN reports. A total of more than 1,500 players have now joined on the suit.