What do NFL Players and the Homeless Have in Common?

Blogger, Dr. Jan Gurley, has written an interesting blog post, What the NFL and the Homeless Have in Common? The answer is a history of significant and repeated headtrauma leading to significant psychiatric impairments.

She cites a study from Toronto in which 53 percent of homeless men and women surveyed at shelters in 2004 and 2005 were found to have suffered significant blows to the head. Twenty percent reported having five or more episodes of serious head trauma, and most said the first came before they were homeless.

Gurley writes on her blog:

What's more, a study like this may actually have under-represented the degree of injury and impairment associated with head trauma among the homeless, since only those people competent enough to seek services at a soup kitchen or shelter were surveyed.

With so much at stake -- the loss of human potential, the damage to our society, the costs of care for these kinds of impairments -- you might think that society would take very seriously the prevention of head trauma among the homeless.