From the New York Times, I'm Michael Bobaro.

This is the Daily.

They started playing football as young as six years old.

They died in their teens and 20s with CTE.

Today, my colleague John Branch, on the growing body of evidence

that a disease many believed was reserved for professional athletes is

also afflicting young amateurs. It's Tuesday, December 19th.

John, John, we want to talk to you because you have spent many years trying to understand what's been happening to the brains of athletes who play contact sports.

And you have been talking to researchers who study those brains

and those researchers recently told you about a major new discovery.

So tell us about that.

Yeah, so what we're talking about,

when we're talking about brain damage

in contact sports athletes is CTE which stands for chronic traumatic

encephalopathy and what this is it's the brain disease progressive brain disease caused by concussions and hits to the head.

And for the most part, CTE has been connected with, at least in terms of the public perception,

aging football players, Hall of Fame style football players,

Ken Stabler, the Earl Morals, people a junior sayow, there are now 300 and some former

NFL players who have been posthumously diagnosed with CTE.

But what's new now is that for the first time these researchers have gathered this growing subset of young brains, of young people, people under the age of 30 into a profound study.

And it shows things that we knew or suspected, but it puts it in very stark stark terms young athletes even teenagers as young as 17 years

old are getting CTE and feeling the effects of it well and these researchers at Boston University have found cases of CT in more than 60 brains of young

...