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.
