Retired NFL Hall of Fame quarterback Brett Favre reveals he has Parkinson's disease

Caption

Former NFL all-star quarterback Brett Favre says he has Parkinson's disease. Favre played 20 seasons in the NFL, mostly with the Green Bay Packers. He retired in 2011. Favre won the Super Bowl and was a three-time NFL MVP. He also had his share of concussions and said he had often had memory loss. / Getty Images via NFL

Brett Favre, the Hall of Fame quarterback who led the Green Bay Packers to a Super Bowl victory in 1997, revealed during Congressional testimony Tuesday that he has Parkinson's disease.

Favre, who is 54, shared his diagnosis in an appearance before the U.S. House Ways and Means Committee on Tuesday in a hearing about welfare accountability and reform.

Since 2020, Favre has been embroiled in controversy over the misuse of public welfare funds in Mississippi, his home state, where audits revealed that public money intended for needy families was used to pay Favre and to fund projects he favored, including the construction of a volleyball facility at the University of Southern Mississippi, where his daughter was a player.

Another of those projects was investment in a pharmaceutical company called Prevacus that had claimed to be developing a concussion treatment drug.

"I thought it would help others," he said Tuesday during the hearing. "It was too late for me because I've recently been diagnosed with Parkinson's."

Favre has said that he was not aware the funds were intended for welfare. He has never been criminally charged in connection with the controversy, and he has filed a defamation lawsuit against Mississippi state officials over the case.

Parkinson's disease is a nervous system disorder that can cause tremors, movement and balance issues and problems with speech. There is no cure, and symptoms typically worsen over time.

Parkinson's and other brain disorders, like dementia, are associated with a history of concussions. So too is the degenerative brain disease CTE — chronic traumatic encephalopathy — which has been posthumously diagnosed in hundreds of NFL players whose brains were donated to researchers for examination.

In a 2018 interview on the Today show, Favre said he had been diagnosed with "three or four" concussions in his NFL career, which lasted from 1991 to 2010.

Caption

Brett Favre #4 of the Green Bay Packers is tackled by a Minnesota Vikings defensive player during the NFC wild-card game at Lambeau Field on January 9, 2005 in Green Bay, Wisconsin. Favre said Tuesday he's battling Parkinson's disease which comes after a 20-year all-star NFL career where he had numerous concussions. / Getty Images

But he added that, as concussion research had advanced in the years since his retirement, he had come to understand he had likely sustained many more than that.

"When you have ringing of the ears, seeing stars — that's a concussion. And if that is a concussion, I've had hundreds, probably thousands, throughout my career, which is frightening," he said then.