Australian rules football player is first female athlete diagnosed with CTE

A former female Australian rules football player was diagnosed with chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), according to findings published Tuesday in the Springer Medical Journal.

Heather Anderson played in Australian Football League Women's for the Adelaide Crows in 2017 before retiring later that year. She died in November 2022 at the age of 28.

After her death, Anderson's family donated her brain to the Australian Sports Brain Bank.

"She was an avid footballer from 5 years of age, with a total contact sport career length of 18 years. She played across two codes, Australian rules football and rugby league, and participated in both simultaneously for approximately 2 years," the Springer Medical Journal said. "By her mid-teens, she had progressed to playing representative women’s Australian rules football, before entering that sport professionally in her early twenties. She retired after one professional season due to musculoskeletal injury."

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CTE, according to Boston University, is a progressive degenerative disease of the brain usually caused by taking repeated blows to the head and can only be diagnosed postmortem.

The authors of the paper noted some male Australian football players such as Danny Frawley and Shane Tuck, and former National Rugby League player and coach Paul Green suffered from CTE when they died and said that rugby is increasing in popularity among female players.

"She is the first female athlete diagnosed with CTE, but she will not be the last," the authors said, adding that Anderson is a "sentinel case." 

"This report may, thus, represent a sentinel case: as the representation of women in professional contact sports is growing, it seems likely that more CTE cases will be identified in female athletes."