Combat Sports Law

If you have a good fight record you probably will have better long term brain health than fighters with a losing record, right? This was the hypothesis in a recent study. Turns out the answer is no. In fact fighters with a better win/loss ratio had greater measurable brain harm than fighters with a losing record.

The recent study, titled Association of Win-Loss Record With Neuropsychiatric Symptoms and Brain Health Among Professional Fighters, was published in the Journal of Neuropsychiatry and Clinical Neurosciences. In it the researches examined data from the Professional Fighters Brain Health Study. In short the data showed that winning fighters demonstrated “greater impulsiveness, slower processing speed, and smaller brain volume in certain regions” than fighters with losing records.

Study after study show that CTE is a disease of mileage. It does not care if you are a professional or an amateur. And, as demonstrated from this study, it does not care if you are a winner or a loser. 

Below is the full abstract:

Objective:

Repetitive head impacts in professional fighting commonly lead to head injuries. Increased exposure to repetitive head trauma, measured by the number of professional fights and years of fighting, has been associated with slower processing speed and smaller brain volumes. The impact of win-loss outcomes has been investigated in other sports, with several studies suggesting that individuals on losing teams experience more head injuries. Here, the authors hypothesized that fighters with a worse fight record would exhibit poorer brain health outcomes.

Methods:

The Professional Fighters Brain Health Study examined changes in neuropsychiatric symptoms, regional brain volume, and cognition among professional boxers and mixed martial arts fighters. These data were used to evaluate the relationship between win-loss ratios and brain health outcomes among professional fighters (N=212) by using validated neuropsychiatric symptom and cognitive measures and MRI data.

Results:

Retired fighters with a better record demonstrated more impulsiveness (B=0.21, df=48) and slower processing speed (B=−0.42, df=31). More successful fighters did not perform better than fighters with worse records on any neuropsychiatric or cognitive test. Retired fighters with better fight records had smaller brain volumes in the subcortical gray matter, anterior corpus callosum, left and right hippocampi, left and right amygdala, and left thalamus. More successful active fighters had a smaller left amygdala volume.

Conclusions:

These findings suggest that among retired fighters, a better fight record was associated with greater impulsiveness, slower processing speed, and smaller brain volume in certain regions. This study shows that even successful fighters experience adverse effects on brain health.