Australian Football Player Becomes First Female Athlete Diagnosed With CTE

The researchers say she will not be the last.
Australian Football Player Becomes First Female Athlete Diagnosed With CTE
Australian Football Player Becomes First Female Athlete Diagnosed With CTE /

Former Australian rules football player Heather Anderson was diagnosed with traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), making her the first known professional female athlete to be diagnosed with the brain disease, researchers said in a paper published Tuesday

Anderson died by suicide in November. She was 28. Her family donated her brain to the Australian Sports Brain Bank (ASBB) where researchers discovered lesions consistent with low-stage CTE.

“She is the first female athlete diagnosed with CTE, but she will not be the last,” one of the paper’s researchers wrote in an article on The Conversation

ASBB director Michael Buckland said the findings were “indistinguishable” from cases where CTE was found in male athletes. 

“It’s a real red flag that now women are participating [in contact sports] just as men are, that we are going to start seeing more and more CTE cases in women,” Buckland said to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

CTE is a brain disorder believed to be caused by repeated head injuries. It gets worse over time and causes the death of nerve cells in the brain, known as degeneration.

She played in the Australian Football League Women’s competition for Adelaide in 2017, appearing in seven games before retiring. Anderson also played rugby during her career.


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Madison Williams
MADISON WILLIAMS

Madison Williams is a staff writer on the Breaking and Trending News team at Sports Illustrated, where she specializes in tennis but covers a wide range of sports from a national perspective. Before joining SI in 2022, Williams worked at The Sporting News. Having graduated from Augustana College, she completed a master’s in sports media at Northwestern University. She is a dog mom and an avid reader.