Tua Tagovailoa's Brain Damage: EXPERT Recovery Protocol for NFL Quarterback

A young sensational football player known as Tua Tagovailoa suffered a quite brutal head injury that left people who saw it speechless. And if you go on YouTube or Google and look up articles or videos about this, you'll see everybody just kind of panicking and telling Tua to retire and saying that he cannot recover from this and this and that and this and this and that. I'm not saying whether that's true or not, I just want to be the voice of reason while everybody else is just panicking and being emotional about it.

So in this blog, we'll discuss what happened to Tua, why his case is so different from everybody pretty much that we see who suffers similar injuries, and what he could do in order to facilitate healing and limit the damage that his body and brain have taken. So as cool as the brain looks in your anatomy lab or the diagram in your book or the drawing you have or the brain little model you have in your room, it's really not like that in real life. Your brain has a consistency kind of like jello, and it's very jiggly and squishy.

Now imagine taking something like that with that sort of consistency, encapsulating it in something very hard like your skull, and then banging that skull. What is going to happen to that gelatinous squishy-like thing is that it's going to have a structural deformity in it due to the impact of the force that the encapsulating object took. Now unlike jello, your brain is actually extremely complex, it is connected to pretty much every other organ in your body indirectly or directly, and without it you cannot perform pretty much any function.

You cannot breathe, your heart cannot beat, you cannot look, you cannot hear anything, you cannot say anything, you can't do anything. You're dead without your brain. But as amazing as that is that this little organ can do so much and is responsible for everything that you do pretty much almost, it is really an intricate, very delicate, really fragile organ that you cannot be beating like that all the time.

And that's why you have neurodegenerative diseases that are associated with contact sports like chronic traumatic encephalopathy. And this disease is thought to be due to a buildup and misfolding of tau proteins as a result of repeated trauma to the head. Now when I say those three letters, CTE, your mind instantly might think of something like boxing, or UFC, and NFL also obviously, but really even something as small and squishy as a soccer ball, being a soccer player and hitting the ball repeatedly can actually also cause CTE.

Because the brain is that intricate and fragile that unfortunately taking any form of beating really is pretty much gonna kill some neurons which are the functional cells of your brain. Now why is Tua different if we already watch boxing and we already watch UFC and all sorts of contact sports where people get concussed and even in the same sport that he's in, people do get concussed and there's not this same overreaction. Well after Tua suffered that concussion, he did something called posturing or fencing and this was not his first time unfortunately.

Now I'm gonna play the video for you of the injury itself and the posturing, but this is what's known as a decorticate posture and it is a very bad prognostic sign of traumatic brain injuries and it really usually indicates a lesion or damage involving the midbrain. Now the midbrain also known as the mesencephalon is a part of your brain stem that connects your cerebrum and diencephalon to your pons and it is involved in many different things including hearing, vision, movement, excitation and so on and it is a very crucial structure like really all of the brain in general, but this is one that is really hard to recover from when you injure it. So for example, having a stroke in your precentral gyrus also known as your primary motor cortex is something that of course is gonna cause pretty severe symptoms when it happens at first, but many people recover from it and they return to normal as if nothing happened.

It is very rare to have something like that happen with a midbrain stroke and for those who don't know, a stroke is the occlusion or rupture of an artery supplying a part of your brain resulting in the necrosis or death of that part. Now being that Tua as it is, is a professional athlete in a pretty violent contact sport like football, predisposes him already to developing a neurodegenerative disease known as chronic traumatic encephalopathy which you might have heard being called as boxer brain or like punch drunk or something, but yeah it is a very serious disease that's usually characterized with things like mood changes, behavioral changes, memory loss, dementia, movement issues and so on and really it's gonna shorten your lifespan as it is, but it's also gonna ruin your quality of life. However, that's not the whole story here.

The reaction that Tua showed after he had already suffered that concussion is more scary than just CTE because it could be an indicator that his next concussion might be his last especially if he comes back too fast, unfortunately, you know, but that doesn't mean really that there should be a state of complete panic and instead really for an athlete like that who's pretty much on the verge of losing everything that he is because football is an identity to these guys, there should be more voices of reason and providing solutions than just sheer panic like I've seen online on YouTube and articles on Google and even fans who support Tua Tagovailoa, you know what I mean, but they don't know any better but we do so we're gonna proceed. So the first part of this little protocol if you will that I've made for Tua or what I would do if I were in his place or if my client were someone like Tua or if anybody really is suffering from the same issue that Tua is suffering from, step one is to take a long time off so not come back this year and really wait for your brain to fully recover and your mind to be back where it was and try to decide whether or not you want to continue this. So you really have two roads in front of you.

The first road is you ride off into the sunset with however many millions you made over your career and choice two being that you continue with the game you love that you've really made an identity but you want to try to mitigate the really risk of having another injury like that. So if he were to choose the second road which is continuing with the game he loves, he needs to learn from other players that are of his stature. Take for example Kyler Murray, Kyler Murray is smaller than Tua even, he takes way more chances, he runs way more aggressively but we've never seen him be concussed, right? Because if you look at the second blow that made Tua go into a de-quarter kick posture he was trying to lower his shoulder and knock down a player that's pretty much twice his size, something that you would never see Kyler Murray do.

So number one he needs to protect himself physically, he really needs to integrate that into his training. Now step number two for Tua Tagovailoa to recover from such a brain injury and the several brain injuries that he had is to put his body in a more autophagy focused state. So what is autophagy? It is a natural process that occurs within your body which is sort of your body's way of recycling and degrading pretty much dysfunctional components of a cell, its organelles and so on via a lysosome dependent mechanism.

If Tua were to really switch his body into that state more than it already is, so by purposefully activating genes like ULK1 and AMP kinase and PINK1 and ATG5 and whatever using specific habits and lifestyle modifications as well as medications and supplements that activate these genes and proteins in order to promote autophagy more, that should be his second step in order to protect what he already has in his brain, prevent further degradation and build up of more dysfunctional components as well as potentially healing what he already has that is already damaged. Step 3 for someone in Tua Tagovailoa's position would be to really take medications and supplements that have been proven to improve outcomes in traumatic brain injuries. That's things like Cerebrolysin and Mexidol and all of that, trying different ones under supervision of course, seeing what works best for him, be proactive about improving whatever function he has and not letting it degrade further over time and if the medication is anti-inflammatory within the brain and proven to do so, then it should be higher on his priority list because after a traumatic brain injury, you do have swelling inside your brain and excessive inflammation.

Step 4 which is also extremely important is to continuously measure cognition levels and not be discouraged by a potential reduction because we have proof that adult hippocampal neurogenesis is possible. It happens in a structure known as the dentate gyrus and not only that but like I said before, if you have a stroke, God forbid, you're not necessarily doomed. A lot of people have things called silent strokes that they don't know about.

A lot of people have pretty tragic strokes that happen, not in the brainstem or the pons but cortical strokes really that happen and result in a significant loss of function, even disability for a little bit and they have pretty much full recoveries phenotypically. So not to be discouraged and continuously measuring whatever cognition he has through whatever method his coach, doctor, whatever recommends to him as long as he's under supervision. It could be a bi-yearly IQ test, it could be Montreal Cognitive Assessment Test, it could be a Stroop test.

I'm not his coach, I'm not his doctor but he should be under supervision and continuously measure his cognition preferably with several of the options and not just one and working on improving and not just maintaining. And step 5 really coincides or overlaps with step 4 which is getting yearly MRIs at least of his brain and checking for any additional signs that indicate any cortical atrophy or atrophy elsewhere or ventricular dilation, whatever. He needs to be checking his brain up with imaging regularly and not really just having a radiologist read his report.

He needs to work with a top-notch neurologist that's specialized in athletic brain injuries. And an honorable mention that I think pretty much could go unsaid but it's better to say it, which is providing your brain with the nutrients it needs and anti-inflammatory supplements that have been shown to improve brain function like zinc and vitamin E and vitamin C and just keeping a really healthy diet. In my opinion, lower in seed oils in order to maintain the structural integrity of the membranes of pretty much all of the cells in your body but also especially your neurons.

Do we have really a more detailed, more intricate, complex protocol with more specific examples of everything I said in these 5 steps? Of course we do. But you're going to have to sign up for that, you're going to have to book a consultation for that and we would be happy to have you.

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