UNC needs to address analyst’s claim of high rates of LD/ADHD in football players

Kevin Guskiewicz is the interim chancellor at UNC-Chapel Hill and may well win the post permanently, but first he should clear up important issues raised in an article and video documentary on the sports website The Athletic.

The Athletic focused on research papers published under Guskiewicz’s direction by researchers at UNC-Chapel Hill. Guskiewicz, a leading expert on concussions, is the founder and co-director of the ’s Matthew Gfeller Sport-Related Traumatic Brain Injury Research Center.

The Athletic cited criticism of the UNC research by Ted Tatos, an adjunct professor of economics at the University of Utah who specializes in economic and statistical analysis. Tatos pored over thousands of athletic department documents from 2004 to 2012 that were made public by an investigation into the university’s recent athletic-academic scandal and came across summaries of cognitive assessments of athletes. He says the documents show unusually high levels of learning disability (LD) and attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) among UNC football players, with rates exceeding 50 percent in multiple years.

UNC graduate students writing their theses on concussion-related issues noted the high levels of cognitive impairment and ADHD stimulant medication use among some of the athletes they studied, but when their findings were published in academic journals the high levels — and the fact that the subjects were taking medication — were not disclosed. Tatos and others argue that the failure to disclose violates academic standards. They add that using medicated athletes can distort the results of post-concussion testing and lead to inaccurate determinations of when players can safely return to competition after a concussion.

Tatos’ findings were first published in June by him and Don Comrie, the chief executive officer of NeuroLabs, in the “Journal of Scientific Practice and Integrity.” The research became the basis of The Athletic article posted on Oct. 8.

The Athletic article prompted 250 academics to sign a letter calling on all NCAA member institutions to release their data on athletes with LD/ADHD. In addition, The Drake Group, an organization based at the University of New Haven in Connecticut that defends academic integrity against what its calls the “corrosive aspects of commercialized college sports,” has called for a federal investigation into concussion studies at UNC and other universities that do concussion research funded by the Department of Defense..

Guskiewicz, who declined to be interviewed by The Athletic, flatly dismissed Tatos’ claims. He said in a statement: “I stand by our concussion research 100 percent. The allegations about our research are baseless, without scientific merit and completely false.”

A statement from the Gfeller Center also noted the “clear bias of one of (the article’s) key sources,” namely Tatos. Tatos is a Duke University graduate who under the Twitter handle BlueDevilicious tweeted critically about UNC’s academic-athletic scandal involving athletes taking fake classes. He dismisses that objection as irrelevant: “I could have been the Blue Devil mascot. It doesn’t change my results one bit.”

Perhaps, but The Athletic report would have helped its credibility by noting the history of friction between Tatos and UNC supporters.

Tatos says that UNC’s argument isn’t with him, but with its own records. It’s a fair point. Guskiewicz and other UNC academic and athletic leaders should address what those records say.

If Tatos’ reading is accurate, many football players appear to be arriving at college already impaired and should not be engaging in further collision sports. If the higher rates are the result of overdiagnosis, it raises another question: Are UNC and other schools using the LD/ADHD labels to reduce academic requirements for athletes and are they over-distributing ADHD medications — stimulants that would be banned if taken by undiagnosed athletes?

UNC and its interim chancellor need to do more than dismiss Tatos and The Athletic report as misinformed. They must address the data the university itself collected. Tatos and The Athletic may be reading the data wrong, but if they are right contact sports may be taking a far higher toll than recognized, or the labeling of student athletes is being abused.

This story was originally published November 24, 2019 at 6:00 AM with the headline "UNC needs to address analyst’s claim of high rates of LD/ADHD in football players."