Dr. Ann C. McKee, a co-director of the Boston University group, said that she was completing a paper on the football C.T.E. cases that could be published as early as May. She added that the presence of C.T.E. in McHale and in a previous case, the former Houston Oilers linebacker John Grimsley, were confirmed by Dr. E. Tessa Hedley-Whyte, the director of neuropathology at Massachusetts General Hospital.</p>
<p>McHale played on N.F.L. offensive lines for nine seasons, most of them with the Buccaneers, before retiring and running several Tampa-area restaurants. According to his widow, Lisa, he developed such chronic pain in his shoulders and other joints that in 2005 he began taking improperly large doses of the painkiller OxyContin, which exacerbated his lethargy and depression and led him to take cocaine occasionally to offset those effects.</p>
<p>McHale spiraled downward, went through drug rehabilitation three times, and died on May 25, 2008, of a lethal and deemed by the police, accidental combination of oxycodone and cocaine. His death shocked many former teammates and players, several of whom remembered him as an intelligent and responsible man.</p>
<p>Lisa McHale said she did not recall her husbands having any concussions in college, he attended Cornell University, or in the N.F.L. McKee said the brain damage Tom McHale developed which drug abuse cannot cause, doctors added probably played a role in his self-destruction in his final years.</p>
<p>You would expect the symptoms of lack of insight, poor judgment, decreased concentration and attention, inability to multitask and memory problems, McKee said of the damage she found in McHale.</p>
<p>Lisa McHale said that the finding of C.T.E. in her husbands brain gave her some solace by offering a more tangible explanation for his emotional demise, and perhaps sparing him from a bleak future. According to Dr. Robert A. Stern of Boston University, who conducted the McHale investigation with McKee, had McHale lived, he probably would have had full-blown dementia by age 60.