"Concussions aren't necessary for CTE to exist," said Dr. Robert Cantu, a Boston University researcher working on the project in conjunction with the Veterans Administration Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy. "Even if he didn't have any concussions, the amount of subconcussive trauma that he had -- he probably had between 1,000 and 1,500 subconcussive blows a year, just from practice and play in games."
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"Brains that we really desperately need to study are the ones that we're not getting," Cantu said. "Those are the ones of people that have played in a collision sport ... and went on to live a normal life. In other words, were not symptomatic."
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"We didn't even know anything about CTE until my dad passed away," Carpenter's daughter, Lisa Prewitt, told the AP. "Knowing that he did have CTE, a lot of those things started to make sense."
Prewitt said her father would ask five times in the car to the doctor where they were going. "Then he arrived at the doctor's office and they started talking about football and he remembered every detail," she said.
"Looking back, if anybody along the line would have known that there was something so significant and he had it, there could have been a whole different approach to his care."
