Dr. Robert Cantu, who was one of the experts that saw Daniel Bryan on his road to being cleared to return to the ring by WWE, has elaborated on his evaluation of Bryan.
“I evaluated Bryan for a neurological opinion on return to WWE on February 26, 2018. Included in his medical records were multiple evaluations by renowned concussion clinicians,” Cantu wrote in an email to Newsweek.
“I determined that Bryan is currently asymptomatic, has a normal detailed neurological and cognitive neuropsychological examination, normal EEG, and an MRI that showed no definite evidence of a prior brain injury. It is my medical opinion that there is no absolute contraindication to his return to in-ring action in WWE.”
When announcing that Bryan had been medically cleared, WWE cited Cantu, Dr. Javier Cárdenas, and Dr. Jeffrey Kutcher as three leaders in their field who had cleared Bryan before he was given the okay by Dr. Joseph Maroon.
Cantu is a co-founder of the Concussion Legacy Foundation, as well as the CTE Center at the Boston University School of Medicine. He’s also the medical director and director of medical research at his own concussion center at Emerson Hospital in Concord, Massachusetts and consults with teams in the NFL, NBA, and NHL.
Dave Meltzer reported in this week’s Wrestling Observer Newsletter that, for the time being, Bryan will undergo impact testing and have a neuropsychological evaluation done after every match when he returns: “The only difference between him and every other wrestler on the roster is that part of his agreement when getting WWE to send him to leading neurologists of Maroon’s choosing to get evaluated, is that he agreed, after every match, until WWE was comfortable that he was okay, he would go to the WWE doctors backstage and get Impact testing and a neuropsychological evaluation done.”