To steer DS away from rugby?

[Oldjumper]

DS is 10 and plays contact rugby for local club.
He loves it and is good-fast, strategic and tackles well.
But he is the smallest in his team and when up against big lads from other teams I worry he will get very hurt. They don’t put them in positions for another couple of years so he can easily be up against someone twice his size and he will go in for the tackle regardless of the size of his opponent.

On the other hand it’s great exercise and the teamwork is incredible. It comes with a good social life (although I also worry about the excessive alcohol culture in a few years time!)

Especially with the sad news stories about Doddie Weir & Rob Burrows and the increase in the chance of neurological issues in rugby players (albeit professional ones not junior club players!). It makes me wonder if I am doing the right thing in encouraging him and whether I should steer him towards concentrating on his other sports.

That's the stats for injuries incurred during play. The problem with rugby is that the effects may take a couple of decades to surface.

I'm an A&E doctor/urgent care GP. There is no way I'd let a child of mine play contact rugby, but it isn't because of injuries at the time of play (spinal injuries are fortunately now very rare) but because of CTE. It's a real shame because rugby is a great game.

It's actually quite frightening the number of people oblivious to CTE posting as if the only risk is scrapes and breaks.

Commuting to school/work isn't going to cause dementia in your 30s.

Ice skating won't leave you dead from MND at 52.

Ds is quite sporty and I just never lifted a finger for him to try rugby. Too dangerous imo. There are a thousand other great sports out there - hockey is the one that springs to mind, it's a fast competitive team sport, or cricket. Ds and friends were mad keen on volleyball for a few years and played endless games in the park. His competitive sports have been athletics and now rowing. I know that leg injuries from football are a major issue but I simply don't think that's the same as the neurological injury side.

YANBU

My dad and his siblings played rugby for the same local team back in the day & a lot of my cousins play and their children. So it's seen as normal in my family and an expectation that children in the family will play rugby.

I wouldn't allow my children to play so you can imagine how well that's gone down with my dad. But it's a much more physical game than it used to be, players even at amateur level are stronger and faster and hits are harder.

I am from a family of rugby players, Inc some who played professionally. I was brought up standing on touchlines all over the country and always assumed any sons of mine would play too.

However, seeing the injuries my family still struggle with and the increase in awareness of the long term effects, I am now not so sure.

There are risks with many things in life as we all know but the repeated battering of a body several times a week (training can be just as intense as a match) is not a route I'm keen for my son to go down.

I'm hoping he'll be a tennis player which brings its own set of injuries but I do fancy a seat at Wimbledon each year 😁

The tackles in league will be much harder and more brutal than union as the age range gets higher, but head contact would probably be less. Dodi Weir (RIP) and Rob Burrow had/have a condition unrelated to their sport. YANBU to worry, we all do about our children, but you YABU to link it to MND or to assume an automatic alcohol culture - younger players at my husband's club are much less interested in boozing than he was.

Dodi Weir (RIP) and Rob Burrow had/have a condition unrelated to their sport.

But it is most likely related to their sport.

www.theguardian.com/sport/2022/oct/04/rugby-urged-to-cut-matches-as-study-finds-players-risk-of-mnd-is-15-times-higher

There's been recent research suggesting the risk of MND is much higher in professional rugby players. More research is needed on the exact links but I don't think it's as clear cut to say there's no effect.

...and there are proportionally many more injuries from equestrian sports and snow related sport, but those are activities to which the offspring of MNetters are absolutely entitled.

It is related. Why are you lying?

@tickticksnooze
Not according to Rob and his medical staff - I have spoken to him about it. One study showed a link. Stephen Hawking didn't play contact sports.

Stephen Hawking didn't play contact sports.

Non-smokers can still get lung cancer. That doesn't mean that there aren't links between smoking and lung cancer.

My 4 year old looks like he'd like to be a rugby player, already has big shoulders and likes to try to run through things. I'll be gently steering him to other sports but not football because it's so competitive from so young.

Not sure that rowing is directly comparable - there's a different kind of tactics in a "who is fastest" sport vs an oppositional sport which will appeal to different personalities.

I very much prefer the direct competition type of sport, my only tactics in running is how fast until I'm at risk of throwing up, go a bit slower than that and hopefully I won't be last.

Hockey probably makes the most sense of the team games open to boys with marginally less risk of concussion. I accept there will be some risk - we do hill walking, kids do gymnastics, skiing, - and my older one got concussion at school when she got hit by a door.

It may be related. We know that the incidence of neurological conditions, including MND and Parkinson's Disease, is higher in people who experience repeated head injury. We don't know whether any particular individual's MND or PD is due to head injury.

So we can say with certainty that there is an association between head injury and MND/Parkinson's. We can say that it is highly likely that MND and PD are caused by head injury, though we don't know the exact mechanism yet. We can't yet say whether given individual would have developed MND or PD without playing rugby.

But the data on CTE is pretty horrifying, even without considering MND and PD. CTE can only be diagnosed at post-mortem. One study of American Football players' brains found CTE in 88% of them. CTE is not a small though horrible risk, like spinal injury. It is a natural consequence of repeated head injury - people who don't get it seem to be the exception.

How would they know? No one knows which individual cases are related to head injury. We just know rates are higher in rugby/soccer/NFL players than the general population.

My Dnephew has had an horrendous concussion from rugby. Will never play again and had to drop out of university. Currently battling serious depression and insomnia and it's hard to say how long recovery will take.
YANBU in the slightest to take your son out of rugby.

And there's been a lot more study into the link between smoking and cancer. The official medical line is that we don't know if anything 'causes' MND.

There's a podcast called Head Noise about brain injuries in rugby which is worth listening to

You don't understand the difference between establishing an association (link) with an illness and understanding the underlying pathology (disease mechanism) that causes the link.

We know that certain behaviours are linked to certain illnesses - smoking and lung cancer, alcohol and liver cancer, infants sleeping on their front and SIDS, etc. In many cases, even decades after the association was first established, we don't understand the exact mechanism by which the disease is caused. That doesn't mean that the link isn't real. If we had waited for the mechanism by which smoking causes lung cancer to be fully understood, we would still not have taken any action to reduce smoking and, worldwide, there would have been millions of preventable premature deaths.

So if we don't know, why are you so quick to say that it is unrelated in spite of this study, and there will be others in the future? And what was the point of bringing Stephen Hawking into it? No one said that it's exclusively caused by contact sports.

I won't let mine play contact rugby (and when I no longer have a say I'll strongly discourage it). A relative of mine was injured and knocked out playing several times and my DC are small and slight. Luckily they've not shown any interest. YANBU. There are other ways to get cameraderie and team spirit. Also quite a high proportion of the rugger lads at uni were sexist dickheads.

@MissLucyEyelesbarrow I wasn't saying OP was unreasonable to be concerned and there have definitely been more credible studies about links to other conditions, such as the one you mentioned. My husband certainly is a mechanical wreck after 30 years of being tackled - he also claims he has some better health indicators than other men his age as a result, such as heart and lung efficiency, muscle mass and a huge social network to stave off mental health issues. With regards to MND, he knows Rob and some of his friends and they are all keen not to discourage rugby out of fear of this specific condition.

People with a disease are often highly invested in denying a link between the disease and an associated behaviour (cognitive dissonance).

And no one knows which individual cases are linked to head injury - anyone who says otherwise is talking bollocks. But the main reason to be wary of rugby at present is not MND or PD anyway, but CTE itself.

There were/are a lot of people involved in the NFL who wanted to deny a link between the sport that they loved and CTE, in spite of the evidence, it doesn't mean that the link didn't exist, and those players also seem to be much more likely to develop MND.

@MissLucyEyelesbarrow I agree, I didn't mean to offend anyone or say there was no danger. I just got prickly when the examples used were Rob and Dodi, both of whom have been hugely supported by their rugby communities and wouldn't want MND to be a reason to discourage anyone's participation. Neither of ours played, beyond school - seeing their dad during and after games (and how he is now) probably put them off, but they are still involved with the sport which, especially for league in some areas, fulfils a very important community role for low cost. I'm sure union is the same for other localities also, although being traditionally for the more affluent, may not be the only option or such a lifeline. See also boxing.