People Neurology: Bennet versus Ann feud captured live!

In a People Neurology exclusive, contentious footage of Dr. Ann McKee and Dr. Bennet Omalu was captured at the 5th Annual Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy Conference. Dr. Omalu was not invited due to their long-standing animosity, but he crashed the party anyway during Dr. McKee's highly anticipated Keynote. While she was presenting quantitative proteomic analysis of the postmortem brain tissue of Aaron Hernandez, Dr. Omalu stood up and admonished the entire audience: “Remember, I discovered CTE! [NOTE: this is false.¹] You will all answer for this on judgment day.”

The crowd gasped...
 
“Don't believe the blonde white woman who claimed she discovered CTE!”

“Ha. I never claimed I discovered CTE,” Dr. McKee snorted.
 
“His criteria don’t make sense to me! I don’t know what he’s doing.”

“The final decision is still with the doctor who is examining. Not every CTE case will have all those [NINDS] guidelines,” Dr. Omalu retorted.

“His criteria for diagnosing CTE are all over the map,” McKee said.

“This is the problem. People lump me with him, and they lump my work with him, and my work is nothing like this.”

The acrimonious exchange, the conference, and the ridiculous magazine cover are all fictitious, but the quotes are faithful renditions reported by the Washington Post in a scathing critique:

From scientist to salesman
How Bennet Omalu, doctor of ‘Concussion’ fame, built a career on distorted science

. . .
Nearly 15 years [after his first paper], Omalu has withdrawn from the CTE research community and remade himself as an evangelist, traveling the world selling his frightening version of what scientists know about CTE and contact sports. In paid speaking engagements, expert witness testimony and in several books he has authored, Omalu portrays CTE as an epidemic and himself as a crusader, fighting against not just the NFL but also the medical science community, which he claims is too corrupted to acknowledge clear-cut evidence that contact sports destroy lives.

. . .
But across the brain science community, there is wide consensus on one thing: Omalu, the man considered by many the public face of CTE research, routinely exaggerates his accomplishments and dramatically overstates the known risks of CTE and contact sports, fueling misconceptions about the disease, according to interviews with more than 50 experts in neurodegenerative disease and brain injuries, and a review of more than 100 papers from peer-reviewed medical journals.

Much of the reporting isn't new: it was widely known four years ago that Omalu exaggerated his contributions to the field (including the “discovery” of CTE), and that he blasted his critics:

“There is a good deal of jealousy and envy in my field. For me to come out and discover the paradigm shift, it upset some people. I am well aware of that.”

What was new is that respected experts publicly questioned Omalu's past work and his widely disseminated claims.

The biggest revelation was that the histology images in one influential paper did not show CTE, and did not appear to be from the brain of the subject in question.

McKee and other experts confirmed, in interviews, something that long has been an open secret in the CTE research community: Omalu’s paper on Mike Webster — the former Pittsburgh Steelers great who was the first NFL player discovered to have CTE — does not depict or describe the disease as the medical science community defines it.

On the more technical side, the WaPo article provided a basic overview of the CTE pathology and what it does to the brain, along with helpful graphics.

Our sister station, Netflix Neurology, will review Killer Inside: The Mind of Aaron Hernandez (the former NFL player and convicted murderer who died by suicide while incarcerated).

Ann McKee with the brain of Aaron Hernandez,
which showed extensive CTE findings

Footnote

¹ In 1928, Harrison S. Martland published PUNCH DRUNK, a paper about boxers with brain damage. And the CTE syndrome was first named by Macdonald Critchley in 1949: Punch-drunk syndromes: The chronic traumatic encephalopathy of boxers.