For N.F.L. Players, Another Risk: Heart Disease

By HARVEY ARATON
NYT

PHILADELPHIA — Eighteen years after his last football game, Brad Quast has a stack of medical records describing the devastating effects of a brief career of very hard knocks: badly injured knees, the remnants of a serious neck injury sustained while playing in college and enough concussive damage to have caused short-term memory loss.

But his physiological reality did not truly hit home until the day his 14-year-old son wavered on playing high school football and made his father the basis of his apprehension.

“I used to play some basketball and try to walk around the golf course,” Quast said. “Zach saw me deteriorate. He said, ‘Dad, you can’t run anymore.’ ”

Not good, they both knew, for a once superfit man who is only 42.

(More here.)