NHL commissioner again denies link between hockey, CTE

After deflecting the question for the last number of years, NHL commissioner Gary Bettman again disputed on Wednesday the link medical doctors have made between playing hockey and developing the brain disease chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE).

Bettman was asked in a sometimes testy interview with NPR: Does the NHL acknowledge that CTE can result from head trauma suffered while playing in the NHL?

“Now you’re going off on a tangent,” Bettman said to NPR’s A Martinez. “We listen to the medical opinions on CTE and I don’t believe there has been any documented study that suggest that elements of our game result in CTE. There have been isolated cases of players who have played the game that have had CTE, but it doesn’t mean that it necessarily came from playing in the NHL.”

A definitive study published last June revealed that repeated head impacts are a definitive cause of CTE. The study came as a collaboration from 14 different doctors in five separate countries, applying data through the “Bradford Hill criteria,” which uses nine benchmarks to “gauge the confidence science can place in causal relationships between an environmental exposure and an adverse health outcome.”

“This innovative analysis gives us the highest scientific confidence that repeated head impacts cause CTE,” said study lead author Dr. Chris Nowinski, who is also the Concussion Legacy Foundation’s CEO. “Sport governing bodies should acknowledge that head impacts cause CTE and they should not mislead the public on CTE causation while athletes die, and families are destroyed, by this terrible disease.”

The NFL acknowledged a link between CTE and repeated head trauma in football  in 2016.

On Wednesday, Bettman told NPR: “What you’re trying to do is equate football to hockey. and the two are not comparable when it comes to head contact.”

In 2019, the NHL agreed to pay $18.5 million to settle a concussion lawsuit brought by 100 former players. The league spent at least $70.6 million in legal fees to defend itself in the suit and did not acknowledge any liability. Bettman and the NHL have also repeatedly denied the published studies from doctors, saying “the relationship between concussions and the asserted clinical symptoms of CTE remains unknown.”

To date, there have been no diagnosed CTE cases that cannot be traced to repeated head impacts.