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| - Late Aussie Rules legend Graham 'Polly' Farmer suffered from chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), the first player from Australia's most popular sport diagnosed with the brain disease linked to repeated concussions, officials said Thursday. Farmer, who died in August aged 84, was found to have had severe CTE when his brain was studied posthumously by doctors at the Australian Sports Brain Bank, said a report they issued this week. The news fuelled calls for changes to better protect younger Australian Football League (AFL) players from blows to the head, after similar steps taken globally in sports such as football, gridiron and ice hockey. "To date, repetitive head injury remains the only known risk factor for the development of CTE," said the report on Farmer's diagnosis. CTE has been found in the brains of players from contact sports including American football, soccer and rugby league but the researchers said Farmer was the first in Australian Rules football, which is played by 1.5 million people, 30 percent of them women. The sport is characterised by forceful collisions, tackles and high jumping catches leading to "a high injury and concussion rate," said the report. "The unique nature of the game places players at risk of head injury from multiple and complex mechanisms, distinct from those of the rugby codes." The AFL has previously been criticised as playing down the danger faced by its players, and the Brain Bank researchers chided the sport's officials over the issue. "Claims of a lack of demonstrated 'causality' are unhelpful, and arguably irrelevant when assessing a public and occupational health issue such as CTE," they said. The AFL was not immediately available for comment, but their guidelines state any player suspected of having concussion in a game must be medically assessed as soon as possible and not allowed to continue playing. An accredited first aider must be present, while children from ages five to 17 need medical clearance before being allowed to play again. Alan Pearce, one of the report's authors, said the CTE diagnosis on Farmer should spur changes to further protect young players from head trauma. He noted that some US states had banned contact for gridiron players under 12 while British football authorities this week issued new guidelines banning heading for children aged 11 and under. "It's not about stopping or changing the sports," Pearce told broadcaster ABC Thursday. "We're just suggesting ... we just modify the sport to reduce the exposure on the brains of developing kids." Farmer, an indigenous trailblazer regarded as one of the greatest AFL players, featured in 356 games between 1953 and 1971, a time when the sport was even more brutal. A ruckman, often the tallest player on the field tasked with jumping into his counterpart and tapping the ball to his teammates, he pioneered the position by leaping early and at times grabbing the ball out of the air with two hands. Farmer had also been diagnosed with Alzheimer's Disease, another degenerative brain ailment. dm/mp/dh
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