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NEW YORK - Extensive brain damage caused by a career in professional wrestling is far more likely than steroids to have led Chris Benoit to kill his family and then himself, medical experts said on Wednesday.
Neurologists with the Sports Legacy Institute who examined Benoit's brain found it pockmarked throughout with evidence of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), whose symptoms include depression, dementia and erratic behavior.
CTE is believed to afflict 20 percent of professional boxers and was found in four professional American football players aged 36 to 50 who died in recent years -- two by suicide -- after showing erratic behavior, the institute said.
The private research institute's experts believe Benoit's brain damage "is enough to very likely explain aberrant behavior including suicide and even homicide," Julian Bailes, chief of neurosurgery at West Virginia University, told a news conference in New York.
Benoit, 40, killed his wife Nancy and 7-year-old son Daniel before hanging himself in their suburban Atlanta home in June in what police labeled a murder-suicide.
That raised speculation it may have been a case of "roid rage," or uncontrollable violence caused by steroid use. An autopsy found Benoit injected steroids not long before he died.
But Bailes said steroids would not have caused Benoit's brain damage, and while he drew no conclusions, he all but ruled out steroids as a cause.
"There is no consensus in the medical community that the syndrome of 'roid rage' even occurs," Bailes said.
The Sports Legacy Institute, an advocate for greater safety in contact sports, was founded by former Harvard University football player and professional wrestler Christopher Nowinski, whose career was cut short by post-concussion syndrome.
Benoit, nicknamed "The Rabid Wolverine" and "The Canadian Crippler," performed for the World Wrestling Entertainment Inc.
Benoit's father, Michael Benoit, granted permission to conduct the test for CTE, which can only be done postmortem. He raised concerns about the extreme nature of the theatrics in professional wrestling.
"The human skull just isn't built to get hit with a table or a chair," he said.
- REUTERS
