In a building off Third Avenue, a Harvard-educated former pro wrestler is helping researchers explore how traumatic head injuries affect the brains of athletes.
Chris Nowinski, 28, of Boston, heads the Sports Legacy Institute, a collective of researchers working to determine longterm mental effects of injuries like concussions.
Nowinski also works as a pharmaceutical consultant for Trinity Partners, located in the City Point Building. He said his office has since been transformed into the institute's headquarters.
He began working for the firm in 1999 as an intern while attending Harvard, where he played football. His career path changed in 2002, when he became a professional wrestler for World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE).
From multiple concussions he suffered wrestling, Nowinski began to study the effects head injuries had on the mental well-being of athletes.
"I got so messed up from my multiple concussions ... then I decided to get that information out to athletes," he said. "I did that by writing a book that came out last October called "Head Games: The Football Concussions Crisis."
Nowinski said over the years, co-workers at Trinity Partners realized the importance of his work and have helped support his endeavors.
"They've always thought the work I was doing with head injuries was worth taking away from the work I did for Trinity," he said. "They've always allowed me to keep a flexible schedule to allow me to finish my book and allow me to travel. They know that this work is unique and incredibly important and had shown great results."
Nowinski said a typical day for him involves reading multiple e-mails from parents and ex-athletes seeking information because they have similar symptoms to the ones he's researching.
"We point them in the right direction for resources," he said. "We are constantly working and looking for new cases to examine and it's a very interesting process."
That process, Nowinski said, involves medically analyzing the brains of athletes, many of whom have died from bizarre circumstances.
"The institute at this point is essentially a collaboration of top researchers of concussions," he said. "The goal is of getting a better understanding of head injuries and bringing that info so people can use it."
A doctor who originally treated Nowinski for his sports-related injuries, Dr. Robert Cantu, would later become one of his partners at the institute along with Dr. Bennet Omalu, a leading forensic neuropathologist.
Nowinski recently made headlines for his research of former wrestler Chris Benoit, who authorities say killed his wife and 7-year-old son and then committed suicide on June 25.
"(Benoit) was the fifth positive case in the Sports Legacy Project. What's been happening for decades is athletes have been dying from bizarre circumstances from strange late onset symptoms," he said. "They will be normal people, great people until the last couple years of their lives. That's why there is this attitude that when athletes leave the game, they miss the game and they snap."
Nowinski said that in each of the five cases studied, some of which involved the death of former NFL players, each athlete developed an abnormal protein in the brain.
"They basically had been killing brain cells and destroying connections between neurons. That was causing these symptoms and causing these behaviors," Nowinski said. "(We're) working to get a better understanding of this unique type of dementia that has not really been studied before. ... We're trying to understand this disease to prevent further cases."
Nowinski said he knew Benoit from his former wrestling career.
"I used to wrestle with Chris and I knew he had a very strong concussion history because he told me about it. As soon as I found out his 7-year-old son was dead, I though he might have played a role," he said.
With suicide as a consistent problem in previous cases, Nowinski said he contacted Benoit's family in attempts to study his brain with other members of the institute.
"It was much more difficult than pulling his name out of a phone book," he said. "I had to find a way to reach out to the family in such a way that it would make them agree to perform this research."
The research involved Nowinski performing a medical analysis of Benoit's brain, in which he claims Benoit had suffered from chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a form of brain damage.
"I had about 48 hours to do it. By a miracle I was able to pull it off and got to perform immunohistochemical analysis of (Benoit's brain)," he said. "There was more brain damage in his brain than any of the NFL players we've examined."
Since then, Nowinski has started a fundraising campaign for the Benoit family to further research on brain injuries.
For more information, visit www.sportslegacy.org
Jeff Gilbride can be reached at 781-398-8005
