NFL official denies trying to influence CTE study

10:19 AM ET

Dr. Richard Ellenbogen, the co-chairman of the NFL’s committee on brain injuries, rebutted allegations he was among at least a half-dozen top NFL health officials who waged an improper, behind-the-scenes campaign last year to influence a major U.S. government research study on football and brain disease.

“We know there are long-term risks of traumatic brain injury, and we need to know the incidence and prevalence,” Ellenbogen told USA Today Sports on Monday. “Is it one in a million or is it 100 in a million? That was the entire thing that got blown up.

“I never talked to Congress. No one ever asked me my opinion. I had two private conversations with Walter [Koroshetz, director of the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke], and this is a lesson I guess: Big Government can crush you if you disagree with them. I’m trying to protect the kids.”

The 91-page congressional report described how the NFL pressured the National Institutes of Health to strip the $16 million project from a prominent Boston University researcher and tried to redirect the money to members of the league’s committee on brain injuries. The study was to have been funded out of a $30 million “unrestricted gift” the NFL gave the NIH in 2012.

After the NIH rebuffed the …

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