Bennet Omalu

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Bennet Omalu (2015)

Bennet Ifeakandu Omalu (born September 1968 in Nnokwa, Anambra , Nigeria ) is a doctor, forensic scientist and neuropathologist . While at the Allegheny County Coroner's Office in Pittsburgh , he was the first to publish case studies of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) in ex- American football players. He later became the senior forensic scientist for San Joaquin County , California and professor in the Department of Medical Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at the University of California, Davis . Omalu is a naturalized American from Nigeria .

Life

Omalu was born during the Biafra War (1967-1970) in September 1968 as the sixth of seven children in southwestern Nigeria. The war forced his family to flee their home in the predominantly Igbo- inhabited village of Enugu-Ukwu. They returned after the war ended. Omalu's mother was a seamstress and his father was a civil engineer and community leader in Enugu-Ukwu.

At the age of twelve, Omalu moved to the Federal Government College Enugu as a secondary school. From 1984 to 1990 he studied medicine at the University of Nigeria in Nsukka . After graduating ( Bachelor of Medicine, Bachelor of Surgery (MBBS)) in 1990, he first worked for some time at Enugu General Hospital and the University of Nigeria hospital and then until October 1994 in the emergency room of the University Hospital in Jos . In 1994 Omalu came to the USA on an epidemiology scholarship, initially to Seattle at the University of Washington . In 1995 he moved to New York , where he attended a training program in anatomical pathology and laboratory medicine at Columbia University's Harlem Hospital Center until 1999 .

He then worked for a year under the direction of coroner and forensic advisor Cyril Wecht as a forensic scientist at the Allegheny County Coroner's Office in Pittsburg, and then began training in neuropathology at the Medical Center of the University of Pittsburgh . He then attended the Graduate School of Public Health at the same university (2004 Master of Public Health (MPH) in Epidemiology) and finally the Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon University (2008 Master of Business Administration (MBA)).

Since 2007, Omalu has served as the chief forensic scientist for San Joaquin County, California and professor in the Department of Medical Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at the University of California, Davis.

Research on CTE

Section through two brains, on the left a healthy brain, on the right a brain with advanced CTE.

Omalu's autopsy of former Pittsburgh Steelers player Mike Webster in 2002 raised awareness of the neurological damage associated with chronic traumatic encephalopathy previously described in boxers and other professional athletes. Webster had died suddenly and unexpectedly after struggling with cognitive and intellectual disabilities, mood swings, depression , substance abuse, and suicide attempts for several years . Although Webster's brain looked normal at autopsy, Omalu performed an independent, self-funded tissue analysis. He suspected that Webster suffered from dementia pugilistica , which was caused by frequent blows to the head and had previously only been discovered in boxers. Using a special staining process, Omalu found large accumulations of tau protein in Webster's brain, which influenced his moods, emotions and executive functions in a similar way as accumulations of β-amyloids contribute to Alzheimer's disease .

Together with colleagues from the Pathology Department of the University of Pittsburgh, Omalu published his findings in 2005 in the journal Neurosurgery in an article entitled "Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy in a National Football League Player". Omalu called for the disease to be further investigated in the cohort of professional football players in the National Football League (NFL), as the true occurrence rates were not known. Omalu naively believed that the National Football League doctors would appreciate his results and could be used to solve the problem. Initially, the article received little attention, but in May 2006 members of the NFL's Mild Traumatic Brain Injury (MTBI) Committee wrote a letter asking the magazine to withdraw the article. The letter accused Omalu of serious misinterpretation of data that the article contained serious errors.

Omalu later co-founded the Sports Legacy Institute (SLI) with neurosurgeons Julian Bailes and Robert Cantu, attorney Robert P. Fitzsimmons and ex- wrestler Chris Nowinski, which was supposed to study the brains of dead athletes for the effects of skulls - To better understand brain trauma in contact sports. Nowinski and Omalu fell out because they both wanted control of the SLI. Bailes and Fitzsimmons withdrew from the SLI, Omalu was forced out. Nowinski co-founded the Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy with Boston University's School of Medicin , which has become Omalu's greatest rival in CTE research and, with better funding, now the most influential in the field. Omalu, Bailes and Fitzsimmons later founded the Brain Injury Research Institute with a similar objective that still exists today.

In November 2006, Omalu published a second article in Neurosurgery containing the results of his investigation into former NFL player Terry Long, who suffered from depression and committed suicide in 2005. Although Long died at the age of 45, Omalu found tau protein concentrations similar to "a 90-year-old brain with advanced Alzheimer's". As with Mike Webster, Omalu found that Long's career as a football player was the cause of his later brain damage and depression. Omalu also found evidence of CTE in the brains of former NFL players Justin Strzelczyk (died in 2004 at age 36), Andre Waters (died in 2006 at age 44) and Tom McHale (died in 2008 at age 45).

In the summer of 2007, Bailes presented his and Omalus' examination results to NFL commissioner Roger Goodell at a league-wide meeting on traumatic brain injury . Bailes later said the research had been "dismissed". The chairman of the MTBI Committee of the NFL, Ira Casson, told the press that in his opinion, scientifically valid evidence of CTE only with athletes such as boxers and some steeplechase - jockeys have given. It was only in December 2009 that the NFL publicly admitted long-term consequences of traumatic brain injuries sustained in football.

Omalu discovered CTE in the brains of military veterans and published the first documented case in an article in November 2011. He discovered evidence of CTE in a 27-year-old Iraq war veteran who suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and committed suicide. Omalu made a link between PTSD and CTE in his article and called for further research.

In March 2016, the Senior Vice President of Health and Safety Policy of the National Football League, Jeff Miller, testified before the US Congress that the NFL now accepts that there is a connection between football and CTE. Nevertheless, CTE research is still in its infancy, for example it is still not clear how high the risk is for individual football players and why some players are more at risk than others.

In the media

Journalist Jeanne Marie Laskas reported in GQ magazine in 2009 about Omalu's efforts to research and publish about CTE despite the resistance of the NFL . Laskas extended the article to the book Concussion , published in 2015, which was made into a film in 2015 (motion picture Shattering Truth ). In the film, Omalu, played by Will Smith , is the central character. The film has been criticized for distorting the actual events. The film led to the establishment of a foundation named after Omalu for the promotion of CTE and traumatic brain injury research, which was dissolved just under a year later.

In September 2016, Omalu caused a stir when he suggested on Twitter that Hillary Clinton might be poisoned and advised members of her presidential campaign to have a toxicological analysis of her blood. He tweeted that he would not trust Russian President Vladimir Putin and then presidential candidate Donald Trump : “With those two all things are possible.” ("With both of them anything is possible").

Omalu published the book Truth Doesn't Have a Side in August 2017 . My Alarming Discovery about the Danger of Contact Sports .

Private life

Omalu is married to Prema Mutiso, who is from Kenya . They live in Lodi , California and have two children, Ashly and Mark. He is a practicing Catholic . He received US citizenship in February 2015.

Works

  • Bennet Omalu, Mark A. Tabb: Truth doesn't have a side. My alarming discovery about the danger of contact sports . Grand Rapids, Michigan 2017, ISBN 978-0-310-35196-2 .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e Bennet Omalu. In: The Biography.com website. December 19, 2016. Retrieved November 3, 2017 (American English).
  2. ↑ a b Jeanne Marie Laskas: The Doctor the NFL Tried to Silence. In: The Wall Street Journal November 24, 2015 ( Memento November 25, 2015 in the Internet Archive )
  3. ↑ a b c d Omalu Bennet: CV. In: UC Davis Health, Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, PDF (accessed November 3, 2017).
  4. ^ Bennet Omalu, MD, MBA, MPH, CPE, DABP-AP, CP, FP, NP. Letter biography. UC Davis Health, Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, accessed November 3, 2017 .
  5. ^ HS Martland: Punch drunk . In: Journal of the American Medical Association . tape 91 , 1928, pp. 1103-1107 .
  6. ↑ RK Sabharwal, PC Sanchetee, PK Sethi, RM Dhamija: Chronic traumatic encephalopathy in boxers . In: Journal of the Association of Physicians of India . tape 35 , no. 8 , 1987, pp. 571-573 .
  7. ^ JA Corsellis, CJ Bruton, D. Freeman-Browne: The aftermath of boxing . In: Psychological Medicine . tape 3 , no. 3 , August 1973, ISSN  0033-2917 , p. 270-303 , PMID 4729191 .
  8. ↑ a b c d e f g h i Jeanne Marie Laskas: Game Brain: Football Players and Concussions . In: GQ . September 15, 2009 ( gq.com [accessed November 3, 2017]).
  9. ^ Bennet I. Omalu, Steven T. DeKosky, Ryan L. Minster, M. Ilyas Kamboh, Ronald L. Hamilton: Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy in a National Football League Player . In: Neurosurgery . tape 57 , no. 1 , July 1, 2005, ISSN  0148-396X , p. 128–134 , doi : 10.1227 / 01.neu.0000163407.92769.ed ( oup.com [accessed November 3, 2017]).
  10. ↑ Keith Harris: WWE subpoenas Dr. Bennet Omalu to hand over deceased wrestler research . In: Cageside Seats . July 17, 2016 ( cagesideseats.com [accessed November 3, 2017]).
  11. ↑ Amrai Coen: American Football: War of the Heads . In: The time . February 18, 2016, ISSN  0044-2070 ( zeit.de [accessed November 3, 2017]).
  12. ↑ Bennet I. Omalu, Steven T. DeKosky, Ronald L. Hamilton, Ryan L. Minster, M. Ilyas Kamboh: Chronic traumatic encephalopathy in a national football league player: part II . In: Neurosurgery . tape 59 , no. 5 , November 1, 2006, ISSN  0148-396X , p. 1086-1093 , doi : 10.1227 / 01.new.0000245601.69451.27 ( oup.com [accessed November 3, 2017]).
  13. ^ Alan Schwarz: NFL Acknowledges Long-Term Concussion Effects. In: New York Times. December 20, 2009, accessed November 3, 2017 .
  14. ↑ Bennet Omalu, Jennifer L. Hammers, Julian Bailes, Ronald L. Hamilton, M. Ilyas Kamboh: Chronic traumatic encephalopathy in an Iraqi war veteran with posttraumatic stress disorder who committed suicide . In: Neurosurgical Focus . tape 31 , no. 5 , November 1, 2011, p. E3 , doi : 10.3171 / 2011.9.focus11178 .
  15. ↑ Ken Belson, Alan Schwarz: NFL Shifts on Concussions, and Game May Never Be the Same . In: The New York Times . March 15, 2016, ISSN  0362-4331 ( nytimes.com [accessed November 3, 2017]).
  16. ^ Benedict Carey: On CTE and Athletes, Science Remains in Its Infancy . In: The New York Times . March 27, 2016, ISSN  0362-4331 ( nytimes.com [accessed November 3, 2017]).
  17. ^ A b Jeanne Marie Laskas: Concussion . Random House, New York 2015, ISBN 978-0-8129-8757-7 .
  18. ↑ Daniel Engber: Concussion Lies . In: Slate . December 21, 2015, ISSN  1091-2339 ( slate.com [accessed November 3, 2017]).
  19. ^ 'Concussion' Subject Bennet Omalu Exaggerated His Role, Researchers Say . In: CBS New York . December 17, 2015 ( cbslocal.com [accessed November 3, 2017]).
  20. ^ A b Rebecca Nuttall: Bennet Omalu Foundation launches in Pittsburgh . In: Pittsburgh City Paper . ( pghcitypaper.com [accessed November 3, 2017]).
  21. ↑ Michelle Lemming: Hollywood-Established Bennet Omalu Foundation Vanishes - Non Profit News | Nonprofit Quarterly. In: Non profit quarterly. November 29, 2016. Retrieved November 3, 2017 (American English).
  22. ↑ Cindy Boren: The man who discovered CTE thinks Hillary Clinton may have been poisoned . In: Washington Post . September 12, 2016, ISSN  0190-8286 ( washingtonpost.com [accessed November 3, 2017]).
  23. ^ Gary Peterson: Why it took a foreign-born doctor to blow the whistle on the NFL's concussion epidemic . In: East Bay Times . August 24, 2017 ( eastbaytimes.com [accessed November 3, 2017]).
  24. ↑ Olivia Truffaut-Wong: Where Is Bennet Omalu's Wife Now? Prema Mutiso Keeps Out Of The Spotlight . In: Bustle . December 31, 2015 ( bustle.com [accessed November 3, 2017]).
personal data
SURNAME Omalu, Bennet
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Omalu, Bennet Ifeakandu (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American physician, forensic scientist, and neuropathologist
DATE OF BIRTH September 1968
PLACE OF BIRTH Nnokwa, Anambra , Nigeria