Late Vikings Great Fred McNeill Diagnosed With CTE

Fred McNeill died on November 3, 2015, one day after watching his last Monday Night Football game. The 63-year-old former Minnesota Vikings linebacker and UCLA grad loved watching the game long after he retired.

LATE VIKINGS GREAT FRED MCNEILL DIAGNOSED WITH CTE

“He loved the game,” said his youngest son, Gavin. “He was proud of what he did.” Gavin also stated that McNeill coached him and his brother in all things: football, basketball, life.

McNeill had transitioned from 12 years of professional football into family life. He had a wife, Tia, and two sons, Fred Jr. and Gavin. He played in two Super Bowls, and spent his last season in the NFL studying law, which eventually led him to become a partner with a firm in Minneapolis.

“Fred did everything,” his wife said. “He played ball, went to law school, prepared for life after football. We had the kids. It was a good life, and then it changed.”

The big ‘change’ of course was the revelation that McNeill suffered from a disease called chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE). The changes began small. McNeill would forget everyday things, like picking up the kids from school. Then, it slowly became more difficult for him to concentrate and complete tasks. He would also sometimes jump out of bed in the middle of the night due to nightmares, and would experience headaches as well.

The same symptoms soon began arising at work, and after they severely affected his performance, McNeill lost his partnership at the firm. His temper also began to change: he would experience brief bursts of anger.

“I look back, we realize that was the first sign of that rage and that frustration of him not being able to be himself and not being able to remember things,” Fred Jr. said.

All of these memory issues and anger problems, which began in his mid 40s, began to take a toll on him and his family. He and his wife separated, filed for bankruptcy, and lost their home.

After doing extensive online research into football and brain injury, Tia McNeill came across the name of Dr. Bennet Omalu, and the disease known as CTE. She reached out to Omalu, and he called back, finishing her sentences after she explained what her husband had been going through.

Many experts and researchers have yet to determine many things about CTE, including what makes certain players more susceptible to it than others. What is clear to several, however, is that it occurs due to repeated head trauma, which results in the buildup of an abnormal protein called tau. Tau can in turn overtake parts of the brain that control for memory, mood, and aggression. The symptoms resemble those of Alzheimer’s but begin much earlier. The disease has four stages, and suicidal thoughts can arise in the most severe cases.

In 2012, Omalu approached the McNeills with a new technology that he had helped developed and is invested in. Called TauMark, it uses a radioactive “tracer” called FDDNP to bind to tau proteins in the brain. The tau proteins can then be seen on a positron emission tomography, or PET scan. Omalu explained to CNN that this technology could only be licensed to corporations and that his motive behind it is not profit but research.

Dr. Omalu’s examination confirmed what he found in his experimental test, which would potentially make Fred McNeill the first person in the world to be diagnosed with CTE before death.

McNeill was also diagnosed with Lou Gehrig’s disease, also known as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), in March 2014. According to several studies, former NFL players have been found to be four times more likely to suffer neurodegenerative diseases such as ALS, Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s.