The NHL’s Deadly Denial: The Dangers of Hockey and CTE

Todd Ewen, a former expert hockey player, took his own life in September 2015 in the basement of his St. Louis home. Ewen had actually been experiencing anxiety as well as memory loss given that his retirement from the NHL, in 1998. Before his fatality, he relied on his spouse, Kelli, that he feared he may have persistent traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE– a neurodegenerative disease that many professionals concur is connected to repetitive head trauma.

Six months later on, Hazrati called with shocking results: Ewen did not have CTE. Hazrati went on to act as a skilled witness for the NHL and also directed to Ewen’s instance as an instance of the inconsistency in CTE pathology. In her specialist report as well as a subsequent deposition, she claimed that there was no web link in between CTE and head trauma and that CTE was not an illness at all.

Regardless of Hazrati’s medical diagnosis, Kelli was encouraged that her hubby had had CTE. She had areas of Ewen’s brain sent from the Canadian Concussion Centre to Boston, so a world-leading specialist on CTE, Ann McKee, might retest them. In late 2018, McKee introduced her own verdicts from the tests: Todd had, as a matter of fact, had CTE.

In this brief docudrama from The Atlantic, Kelli Ewen states the function her late spouse played in the sport of hockey before and also after his death.