Analyzing Stakeholders post #4

In this article, “Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy: A Potential Late Effect of Sport-Related Concussive and Subconcussive Head Trauma” the respected people who are responsible for writing this article are those who have studied about CTE’s, and head trauma’s. In a general perspective those writing this article have a PhD in some sort of degree relating to the medical field. When reading this article, I came across some very interesting and helpful facts that helped me understand more about the brain and the different effects it has when damaged.This article is a very reliable source due to all the information provided, how they worded certain facts, and how they explained certain topics that helped the reader understand the article more.

In the beginning of the article it lists many names of those who are PhD’s that have incorporated some sort of information towards this article. Other than the list of names, throughout the article, it provides many facts, words, and statements that indicate that this article is written by Phd’s. In the article, it says, “If one considers the prevalence in deceased professional American football players who died between February 2008 and June 2010, there were 321 known player deaths and the brains of 12 of the 321 underwent postmortem neuro­ pathologic examination at Boston University Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy (BU CSTE). All 12 examined neuropathologically showed evidence of CTE, suggesting an estimated lifetime prevalence of at least 3.7%.” Providing facts such as this one gives a lot of credibility towards this article and gives us the impression that they have researched a lot about this topic. Another fact that was provided in the article was, “Recently, in addition to severe tau neurofibrillary pathology, the authors found a wide­ spread TDP­43 proteinopathy in more than 80% of their cases of CTE.13 Moreover, in 3 athletes with CTE who developed a progressive motor neuron disease several years before death, there were extensive TDP­43 immunoreactive inclusions in the anterior horns of the spinal cord, along with tau­immunoreactive GTs, neurites, and, occasionally, extensive NFTs.” This is also a very strong fact that showed how the authors themselves performed procedures and took their results and incorporated it into this article.

Another way that this article shows a strong case of credibility is how they worded certain facts and explained how certain things worked. Throughout this article, that authors use words such as, inclusions, upregulated, consensus, and many other words. What was very helpful in understanding this article was that they used these complex words in an easy sentence. For example, in this article it says, “Several individuals with neuropathologically confirmed CTE are thought to have developed problems with drug abuse as a consequence of the loss of inhibitory control caused by the neurodegenerative disease.” With this sentence I can clearly understand that CTE’s can cause drug abuse problems without fully understanding the word inhibitory control.

Overall, this article shows a very strong sense of Ethos. Ethos is based on credibility and trustworthiness and this article gives just that. With all the information and back-up information to further state their facts this article seems to be very reliable. This article also gives information that they researched from other credible sources such as Boston University Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy. Aside from facts and wording certain sentences nicely, this article organizes their facts and explanations in a very easy way where we can understand more complicated explanations. This shows how the author really understands what they are talking about and convert such complex explanations into something us as people who aren’t experts on this information easier to understand.