Around 350,000 people are taken into hospital in the UK each year with some kind of brain injury. The brain, in many ways, is our most fundamental organ. It’s the thing that makes us who we are. And yet, brain injury has not tended to be a condition that’s attracted a great deal of attention. Thankfully, that seems to be changing.
Most recently, ten players, including former Great Britain scrum-half Bobbie Goulding, announced in October that they were suing the Rugby Football League for “neurological complications” from years of going head-to-head in one of the world’s toughest sports. These complications include early-onset dementia and a swelling of the brain known as Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy. They’re not the first to highlight the way that sporting life has left them cognitively impaired. Back in August, former Manchester United and Scotland forward Denis Law went public about the memory problems and confusion he was facing after many years of heading heavy leather footballs (very successfully) into his opponents’ goals.
The reaction to both cases has been encouraging and sympathetic. The Rugby Football League has committed to “improve and develop its approach to concussion, head injury assessment, education, management and prevention across the whole game”. In response to Denis Law’s revelations, the Telegraph’s Chief Sports Writer, Oliver Brown, said that heading in football was “on borrowed time”. Unfortunately, these kinds of bold calls to action are not heard in the case of all forms of cognitive impairment. When it comes to the cluster of conditions known as alcohol-related brain damage (ARBD) there is still a great deal of shame and silence.
Just like sportsmen cited above, many people with ARBD have developed the condition, in part, as a result of traumatic blows to the head: from falls, fights and assaults, or domestic abuse. Unlike those footballers and rugby players, they face the additional hurdle of the lingering belief that they have somehow brought their troubles upon themselves. It’s fairly clear that Denis Law’s dementia is a result of his former job. He recalls how he would get headaches from heading the ball and sensed it was “doing me no good”. Even more starkly, Jeff Astle of West Bromwich Albion and England was judged by a coroner in 2002 to have died from “industrial disease” as a result of the brain damage he suffered from heading footballs in the 1960s and 1970s. Quite rightly, both these men are seen as having done nothing to deserve their illness. That’s only fair, but it’s not how society tends to look at people with ARBD – if looks at them at all.
With widespread ignorance and underdiagnoses of ARBD, people with the condition are often shunted between services that don’t know what to do with them. They might be placed in care homes for the elderly; or end up occupying a hospital bed because no one’s quite sure where else to put them. Back in 2018 we reported on our blog the story of someone seeking ARBD support. Dementia charities were reluctant to help (“Sorry, it’s not really our field”) as were older people’s charities (“Sorry, she’s not very old, is she?”) carers’ support groups (“Er, sorry, we don’t really know about alcohol problems”) and local social services (“Sorry, there’s nothing that we can do”).
The tragedy of the current situation is that ARBD, once detected, is very treatable – indeed, more treatable than many other kinds of cognitive impairment. With a combination of abstinence from alcohol, high-dose vitamin therapy, and support to re-learn lost skills, many people make a good recovery. But this kind of comprehensive treatment package is not available everywhere. There are some pockets of good practice, and a national treatment framework for ARBD is in the pipeline in Wales. Alcohol Change UK is continuing to make the case for support to be available consistently across the UK.
Find out more here about alcohol-related brain damage, its signs and symptoms, how it can be treated, and what support is available.
