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.