Maybe risks of bad knees, and backs, but Alzheimer’s and Dementia? I don’t think so.
It’s actually only been in the last few years that medical science has come to realize how serious even one head injury can be. When my boy got a bad concussion last year, his doctors gave me rafts of recent medical journal articles showing the new work that’s being done in this field. Nobody thought a few concussions—not even enough to put someone in the hospital—could be such a disaster decades later. The data wasn’t there. Football players, who aren’t the best educated people in the world anyway and certainly don’t keep up on medical research, couldn’t know. Doctors didn’t know.