In this week’s health report, WHCU’s Pete Blanchard sat down with a former professional boxer who’s raising awareness about the impact of concussions in sports.
(Scroll down to listen to the interview)
A native of Geneva, NY, Ray Ciancaglini was a professional middleweight boxer from the late 1960s through the early 1970s.
But his career came to a halt when he started to develop a condition called dementia puglistica, also known as boxer’s syndrome. It’s the same disorder that former NFL players are struggling with, prompting lawsuits against the NFL.
“I had symptoms lagging throughout my career that were holding me back, but we didn’t know what they were,” Ciancaglini said. “It takes time for unaddressed concussions to catapult into pugilistica dementia, or CTE.”
Since then, Ciancaglini has been a concussion awareness advocate. He was the keynote speaker at SUNY Cortland’s sports medicine symposium last week.
He endorses every sport and says athletes should always play with 100 percent effort.
“Sports build great character and self-esteem. We don’t want to ever take that away,” he said. “But you have to realize, and that goes with any injury, you address it properly and you should be good to go.”
A new Canadian study that came out of the University of Toronto last week suggests mixed martial arts has a higher rate of concussions than football, hockey and boxing.
Ciancaglini says he doesn’t discourage anyone from pursuing professional sports, even MMA.
Ciancaglini will share his story with Ithaca College students this Thursday at noon at the Hill Center.
