On page 68 of the Boston University Hope Study questionnaire, there was this question: “Have you ever injured your head or neck in a fight or been hit by someone? ‘A ? »
For Chris Nilan, a simple “yes” would never tell the whole story.
The answer spans more than 300 bare-knuckle fights as a professional hockey player and countless other brawls on the streets of Boston since his childhood. Most of the time, Nilan had the last word. But hockey fights almost always involve exchanges of blows, sometimes which break bones, damage ligaments… and shake the brain.
The Hope Study, led by the Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE) Center at Boston University, has been measuring the brain health of living subjects with Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias since 1996. Nilan, curious about the state of his brain after years of fierce battles on the ice and eager to contribute to research, turned to Boston University, where participants return each year to undergo extensive testing and, possibly, donate their brains. CTE can only be diagnosed posthumously, but tests performed in the Hope study can provide valuable clues while patients are alive.
One of the key elements of the research is the history questionnaire, in which subjects detail their history of brain impacts.
Nilan had only played a few games in the NHL when one night in 1980, while still a tough rookie for Montreal, he dropped the gloves and fought against Stan Jonathan and Terry O’Reilly of Boston, two of the most feared pugilists in league history. The fights took place in consecutive periods – the hockey equivalent of boxing against Muhammad Ali and Mike Tyson within an hour of each other.
Nilan, nicknamed Knuckles even before he turned professional, survived that night, along with 12 other seasons of fighting and scoring (118, including the playoffs). He won the Stanley Cup in 1986 with Montreal and was named an All-Star in 1991. During his 13 years in the league, he fought 316 times, ranking third in NHL history for the most of fights, according to the NHL Fight Card database.
All this was followed, coincidentally or not, by years of drug addiction, alcohol abuse and anger management issues, before Nilan settled down for a quiet life in the suburbs of Montreal. Endearing and full of humor, with a Boston accent thicker than Chahles Rivah’s mud, Nilan now hosts the podcast show Raw Knuckles. He fishes, cooks, reads daily—mostly books on military history—leads drug recovery groups, and spends quiet time with his fiancée, Jaime Holtz.
But if there were a high-risk candidate for CTE, the degenerative neurological disease associated with repeated impacts to the head or blows violent enough to shake the skull, Nilan would seem to fit that category.
Researchers have long suggested that the more blows a person receives to the head, including subconcussive blows, the more likely they are to develop cognitive and neurological problems later in life. A study earlier this year on the brains of football players suggested that the cumulative impact of multiple hits may also play a role.
Some thirty years after retiring from an uncompromising, violent and successful career, and with the encouragement of the widow of one of his colleagues who had the disease, Nilan enrolled in the Hope study.
“I don’t worry about having CTE,” Nilan said. But sometimes we ask ourselves questions.
10 years ago, we might have been more worried. Nilan’s drug addiction and outbursts of rage mirror the behavior of other retired hockey strongmen, such as Bob Probert, Derek Boogaard, Wade Belak, Todd Ewen and Steve Montador. All were diagnosed as suffering from CTE, which can only be detected after death.
More than a dozen hockey players have been diagnosed with CTE, and not all of them were fighters. The latest is Henri Richard, a skillful little center from the Canadian who died in 2020, the kind of player Nilan was paid to protect.
Nilan is now 65 and sober, but he retains a sharp mind and memories of a tumultuous and violent life that brought him alongside some of Boston’s most infamous figures, including James Bulger, the murderous crime boss, known as Whitey, who was Nilan’s stepfather.
On April 17, Nilan joined the Hope study. From their home, he and Holtz answered general questions during a video conference with the researchers, who asked them about Nilan’s family and behavioral history, his moods, his memory, his mother’s dementia and his career on the ice.
A few weeks later, he traveled to Boston to take the cognitive and medical tests, and a month later received the results that can give participants insight into their brain health at that moment.
Nilan participated in the study while feeling healthy and robust, maybe even a little lucky. He sympathizes with players who suffered from the same dangerous role as him, and does not point fingers at them.
In 2013, a group of former players sued the NHL for failing to adequately address head injuries. Nilan was invited to join the group, but declined, believing that the sport was not the cause of his substance abuse problems and that he did not regularly suffer from depression.
However, because of his almost unrivaled history as a hockey fighter, Nilan has become an important subject for researchers studying the effects of repeated brain impacts and ways to detect them before death.
Even if Nilan doesn’t have CTE or show signs of cognitive impairment, researchers will want to know what it is and what can be learned from it.
“This is huge,” said Dr. Michael Alosco, co-director of clinical research at Boston University’s ETC Center. Why do some people get it and others don’t? What makes them different? This could be very informative for treatment and prevention. »