Hall of Fame quarterback Brett Favre said during a congressional hearing on Tuesday that he has been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease.
Favre said at the social responsibility hearing that he had lost his investment in a company he believed was developing a breakthrough concussion drug.
“Even though it’s too late for me – I was recently diagnosed with Parkinson’s – this is a cause very close to my heart,” he said.
Favre played 20 seasons in the NFL, most of them with the Green Bay Packers, with whom he won the Super Bowl in 1997. The 54-year-old, who retired from football after the 2010 season, said he may have suffered more than 1,000 concussions during his playing career.
“If you have ringing in your ears and you see stars, that’s a concussion,” Favre said on the Today show in 2018. “And if that’s a concussion, I’ve had hundreds, maybe thousands, over the course of my career, and that’s scary.”
Parkinson’s, a degenerative neurological disease that affects movement and can cause tremors, speech problems, and balance issues, is linked to concussions. According to a 2020 study published in the Family Medicine and Community Health Journal, a single concussion can increase the risk of Parkinson’s by 57%. Concussions are also linked to other conditions, such as CTE. CTE, which can only be definitively diagnosed at autopsy, is a neurodegenerative disease linked to repeated head trauma. Symptoms that appear throughout life include cognitive impairment, impulsive behavior, depression, suicidal thoughts, short-term memory loss, and emotional instability.
Favre is one of several defendants named in a 2022 civil lawsuit filed by the Mississippi Department of Human Services. The lawsuit accuses him of misusing welfare funds earmarked for the state’s neediest families under the federal Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program. He was never charged with any crimes related to the funds.
“The challenges my family and I have faced over the past three years – because certain government officials in Mississippi failed to protect federal TANF funds from fraud and abuse and now wrongly try to blame me for it – have damaged my reputation and are worse than anything I experienced in football,” Favre said at Tuesday’s hearing, where Republicans advocated reform of the federal welfare system to better prevent fraud.
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Favre said he did not know the payments he received came from social funds, pointing out that his charity has donated millions of dollars to children from poor families in his home state of Mississippi and in Wisconsin, where he played for the Packers.
