CTE research going ahead despite funding issues

7:49 PM ET

BOSTON — Researchers are moving ahead with efforts to develop a diagnostic test for chronic traumatic encephalopathy — even without the NFL’s help.

Some of the nation’s top brain scientists gathered Wednesday at the Boston University School of Medicine for the start of a seven-year, $16 million research project designed to find a test for CTE and identify its risk factors.

For now, the disease increasingly found in former football players can only be diagnosed during an autopsy.

“This is a recipe for being able to define what CTE is in living human beings,” said Jeffrey Cummings, director of the Cleveland Clinic’s center for brain health and one of the principal researchers. “That’s so important, because if you can diagnose something, then you can begin dealing with it.”

The DIAGNOSE CTE project had originally been set to receive money that the NFL earmarked for concussion research. But the league’s complaints about Boston University researchers led the National Institutes of Health to pay for it with other funds.

Doctors at the meeting on Wednesday said they were looking ahead, to the research, and not dwelling on the political maneuvering that delayed its start.

“I don’t look back,” said Robert Stern, the Clinical Core Director of BU’s Alzheimer’s Disease and CTE Center and another of …

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