Bennet Omalu Biography
Bennet Omalu is a Nigerian-American physician, forensic pathologist, and neuropathologist, who was the first to discover and publish data on chronic traumatic encephalopathy in American football players.
How old is Bennet Omalu? – Age
He is 53 years old as of 30 September 2021. He was born in 1968 in Idemili South, Nigeria. His real name is Bennet Ifeakandu Omalu.
Bennet Omalu Family
Omalu was born as the sixth of seven siblings and is of Igbo heritage (previously “Ibo”). He was born during the Nigerian Civil War when his family was forced to abandon their home in Enugu-Ukwu, a mostly Igbo hamlet in southeastern Nigeria. They came back two years after Omalu was born. In Enugu-Ukwu, Omalu’s mother was a seamstress, and his father was a civil mining engineer and community leader. The surname Onyemalukwube translates to “he who knows, talks.” The surname Omalu is a shorter variant of the surname Onyemalukwube, which means “he who knows, speaks.”
Is Bennet Omalu still married? – Wife
He is married to Prema Mutiso, who is from Kenya. They have two children, Ashly and Mark, and live in Elk Grove, California. He is a devout Catholic who became a naturalized citizen of the United States in February 2015.
Bennet Omalu Books
Journalist Jeanne Marie Laskas wrote on Omalu’s efforts to study and promote CTE over NFL opposition in a GQ magazine article in 2009. Laskas expanded the essay into a book, Concussion (Penguin Random House, 2015), which was adapted into a drama film of the same name. Will Smith’s character, Omalu, is the key character in the film. Despite the fact that the film purports to be “based on true events,” it has been panned for errors. Despite this, the film’s production led to the establishment of an Omalu Foundation to further CTE and concussion research.
Dr. Bennet Omalu “routinely exaggerates his successes and drastically overstates the known risks of CTE and contact sports,” according to a January 2020 piece in The Washington Post. On January 28, 2020, Omalu responded to Will Hobson’s essay with a response titled “We Are Becoming a Nation of Lies.”
Truth Doesn’t Have a Side: My Alarming Discovery about the Danger of Contact Sports, written by Omalu, was published by HarperCollins in August 2017. Play Hard, Die Young: Football Dementia, Depression, and Death, which he released in 2008, was his first book.
Bennet Omalu Ne Worth
He has an estimated net worth of $1.5 Million.
Bennet Omalu Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy
Until December 2009, the NFL did not officially acknowledge the relationship between football concussions and long-term neurological consequences. Dr. Malachi Omalu received the Distinguished Service Award from the American Medical Association in 2016 after publishing the first documented case of traumatic brain injury (CTE) in a living individual in 2011. The NFL’s executive vice president of health and safety policy testified before Congress in March 2016 that the league now believes there is a link between football and CTE. Six professional wrestlers were diagnosed with CTE after their deaths, according to a lawyer who represented over 60 wrestlers in a class action case against WWE.
In 2002, Omalu’s autopsy of former Pittsburgh Steelers player Mike Webster resurrected awareness of chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a brain disorder linked to repeated head trauma. Webster had battled cognitive and intellectual handicap, poverty, mental disorders, depression, drug usage, and attempted suicide. Omalu discovered huge accumulations of tau protein in Webster’s brain using specialized staining, which impact mood, emotions, and executive abilities in a similar way as Alzheimer’s disease. Dr. Malachi Omalu submitted a second Neurosurgery study in 2006 based on his findings in the brain of former NFL player Terry Long, who died by suicide in 2005 after suffering from depression. Tau protein concentrations were more in line with “a 90-year-old brain with severe Alzheimer’s” according to him.