I’m not a doctor and therefore, I’m not qualified to draw conclusions about what eventually happens to people’s brains after years of playing contact sports – most notably football.

But the latest news involving Chris Henry’s death has sprouted a discussion that everyone can be a part of because it strips away the football aspect of the game and reminds us that athletes’ long-term health is at risk.

Henry died last December when he fell out of the back of a truck and suffered serious head trauma. Despite the fact that he had no documented instances of concussions while at West Virginia or with the Bengals, recent reports state that he had suffered from Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, or CTE, before his death. (In layman’s terms, he was dealing with brain damage even before he met his tragic end.)

According to doctors, symptoms of CTE can include failure at personal and business relationships, use of drugs and alcohol, depression and even suicide. Henry’s legal troubles over the years have been well documented and just recently, his mother claims that he suffered two concussions while playing high school football, which resulted in headaches. She also states that he started smoking marijuana right around the same time.

But just because Henry smoked pot doesn’t mean that it was because he had brain damage from playing football. He could have made a conscious decision to toke up, just as he could have made a conscious decision to conceal a firearm in January of 2006 (which led to an arrest), assault a valet attendant in Kentucky in 2007, as well as punch an 18-year-old boy while throwing a beer bottle through the window of his car in 2008.

My point is that just because Henry had CTE, it doesn’t mean that anyone can draw conclusions that his issues with the law were directly related to brain damage. Nor can anyone definitively say that playing football caused his CTE. Millions of people play football every year and not all of them are doing drugs, getting arrested for assault or suffering from brain damage.

That said, we can’t say that playing football didn’t cause his CTE either. And perhaps that’s the most frightening aspect of this entire situation. The NFL has had a huge problem on its hands for a while, and that’s protecting the long-term health of its players. That’s why it’s vital that the league continues to do research on the latest equipment to ensure that their athletes are as protected from serious injuries as possible – especially head injuries.

Over the last couple of years, the league has taken a proactive approach in updating the padding of players’ helmets and have put rules in place that prohibit players from returning to the field too soon after suffering from concussions. It’s a good start, but the NFL can’t stop there.

The league needs to invest in long-term research about what happens to players’ bodies long after they’ve hung up their cleats. Chances are that had Henry not died, his brain damage wouldn’t have been discovered. But even though his death was tragic, maybe it will serve as a wake up call to the NFL that it needs to be even more proactive when it comes to researching what the game’s affects can have on a players’ health.