Health & Science

The price football players pay

Football fans love to watch their favorite players crash into each other on the field. But if fans could see these gladiators years later, says the Los Angeles Times, they would be shocked to find some of their once-powerful heroes badly diminished by brain damage. Dissections of the brains of six former NFL players showed severe disease that appeared to be the result of repeated concussions sustained while the men were still in the game. All six players had shown mental deficits during their lifetimes—behavioral and emotional problems that eventually led to early death. The most recently studied player was 45-year-old Tom McHale, a former member of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, who died of a drug overdose after years of depression and physical pain. Researchers determined through a study of his brain that he suffered from chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a degenerative disease that is caused by multiple concussions. The study has drawn the attention of scientists and doctors, who are realizing that it doesn’t take very many concussions to cause permanent brain damage. Sports medicine expert Dr. John DiFiori of UCLA hopes that the new research will increase “recognition that concussions are a serious injury and that symptoms should not be ignored.’’ He warns parents and coaches to keep an eye out for concussion symptoms such as headache, dizziness, and sudden mood swings. Young athletes are likely to ignore such problems in order to “stay in the game.”

This calls for a toast

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After too many drinks, men often have trouble closing the deal in bed. But a new study of nearly 1,600 men has found that over a longer period of time, a glass of wine or beer a day can help to stave off impotence. Australian epidemiologists found that men who drank moderately were up to 30 percent less likely to experience sexual difficulties later in life than those who didn’t drink at all. The finding is not that surprising, researchers say, because previous studies have found that drinking a glass of wine a day promotes cardio­vascular health, thanks to the antioxidants. Men with healthy circulatory systems maintain sexual function longer in life. But when it comes to alcohol and sex, psychotherapist Jonathan Alpert tells the New York Daily News, more is definitely not better—especially on a given night. “There’s a fine line between what might be therapeutic and calming, and what might be detrimental to performance,” he says.

The first human test of stem cells

For the very first time, the Food and Drug Administration has approved a medical study involving the therapeutic use of embryonic stem cells on human patients. The study will test whether embryonic stem cell lines can repair damage to the spinal cords of about 10 paraplegic patients. The approval appears to mark a major change in attitude toward stem-cell research under the Obama administration, even though it has yet to lift former President Bush’s ban on federal funding for most stem-cell research. “It signals to me that we have the primary regulatory authorities on board for embryonic stem cells,” says Alan Trounson, president of the California Institute of Regenerative Medicine. “That really is a tremendous piece of news.” Since embryonic stem cells can develop into any cell type in the body, researchers are hoping that stem cells injected into the site of a spinal cord injury will grow into new neurons, repairing the nerve gaps that cause paralysis. In studies of mice and rats, stem cells did, in fact, help repair damaged spines. But doctors have no idea how stem cells will react in human beings. It’s possible that the cells will become cancerous or cause other types of disease, so this preliminary trial will involve just a few patients. “This really is a first go, with a lot on the line,” says Dr. David Scadden of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute.

Your most distant ancestor

The ancestor of all animal species on Earth looked a lot like a sperm, says a new evolutionary analysis. Biologist Rob DeSalle and his colleagues at the American Museum of Natural History traced all animal species back to a single-celled creature called a choanoflagellate, shaped like a tiny jellyfish with a single tail to propel it. From there, Animalia evolved into two distinct groups: animals with bilaterally symmetrical bodies, like ours, called bilaterians, and animals with no symmetry, like corals, called non-bilaterians. The most interesting thing about this division is that both groups evolved sophisticated nervous systems, but their shared ancestor had no nervous system at all. “So this means that if our work is right, nervous systems evolved twice: Once in the lineage leading to bilateria and once in the lineage leading to corals, jellyfish, hydra, and cubozoa,” DeSalle tells Discovery News. What this tells us, evolutionary scientists say, is that natural selection is an enormously flexible and pragmatic process, with the same features—nervous systems and eyes, for example—evolving along parallel paths among different creatures.