I think there's a fair distinction to be drawn between sports that might cause head trauma if you make a mistake, and sports in which head trauma is practically the defining characteristic (see also: boxing). I am three weeks away from having a son, and while I've got some years, I'll eventually have to make some decisions about what activities I want to encourage and discourage. It at least seems possible to learn to ski without repeatedly bashing your head. Not so for football.
I ski and snowboard and I'm not planning on stopping, I think the benefits outweigh the risks. I'd say that about most sports but I'm not about to let either of my kids play football or box.
We need to study this stuff a lot more.
Again, someone studied football players because the impact is obvious. As it reaches out, players in even relatively low-g sports like soccer are being found with CTE.
And the part of soccer that seems to cause concern is heading the ball, not the running around part.
Comparing helmet to helmet impacts to skiing over rough terrain feels like a real stretch here.
But we don't know what the concern is in soccer. Heading is immediately looked at because it's an impact, but the actual cause may be something altogether different.
I mentioned the g forces measured in skiing elsewhere. They are absolutely in the range of subconcussion.
We evolved to walk with a limited brain suspension that just wasn't adapted for 100kph wax shoe runs.
If you're skiing at the level I'm talking about, falls are probably not that frequent, though.
In my earlier comment I was talking more about the explosive vertical compression-expansion cycle that characterizes skiing really hard with very tight turns on short radius skis. Those are much less violent than hitting a lineman though.
Where are you skiing that results in you receiving repeated blows to your head?
The comparison doesn't hold up at all, and OP's original point still stands against yours.
When you have a number of HN commenters correcting you, it's not them it's you.
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2995699/
[2] http://www.uwhealth.org/sports-medicine/clinic/concussion/11...
Take a moment and review the HN Guidelines please: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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Guidelines are exactly that, guidelines. If you can't follow them here on HN please avoid commenting.
I will engage no further with a user like yourself who cannot comment in a civil matter.
In football, as in boxing, the original investigation began because head trauma is obvious, but as the study broadened some of the worst cases of CTE were actually offensive linesmen. These are generally not the players who dish or receive hard hits, and many had never had a suspected concussion in their career. That led to the dominant theory that it isn't concussions -- the big hits -- that are the main cause of CTE, but instead many small traumas (in that case the o-line engaging with the d-line) that add up to CTE.
There is every reason to suspect that many other sports yield these sorts of recurring sub trauma, and aggressive skiing seems a probable candidate [edit - note that it does not require that you hit your head, have an accident, etc. If enough of a high-G event is transmitted to the brain, that can be a subconcussion]. It just isn't terribly common to do an intensive brain study of people after death to find these correlations.