The NFL is partnering with Boston University brain researchers who have been critical of the league's stance on concussions, The Associated Press learned Sunday.

The league now plans to encourage current and former NFL players to agree to donate their brains to the Boston University Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy.

The research centre says it has found links between repeated head trauma and brain damage in boxers, football players and, most recently, former NHL player Reggie Fleming.

"It's huge that the NFL actively gets behind this research," said Robert Cantu, a doctor who is a co-director of the BU centre and has spoken negatively about the league in the past.

"It forwards the research. It allows players to realize the NFL is concerned about the possibility that they could have this problem, and that the NFL is doing everything it can to find out about the risks and the preventive strategies that can be implemented."

NFL spokesman Greg Aiello said Sunday that the league also is committed to giving $1 million US or more to the centre. Aiello said the league already has held discussions with the NFL Alumni Association about suggesting that retired players look into participating in BU's work by offering their brains for study after they die.

The league also will contact the nearly 100 retired football players who have been diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease or dementia and are receiving benefits from the league to ask their families to consider donating those players' brains to the BU study.

"The people affiliated with the centre have identified the donation of brains, both from healthy people and those that have had multiple concussions, as their most critical need right now to further the research into this disease," Aiello said. "We … will discuss with the centre its research needs as we go forward in this partnership."

Congressional hearings

Cantu said he and NFL commissioner Roger Goodell met in October to discuss concussions and the BU project.

Sunday's news represents the latest in a series of moves the NFL has made in recent weeks to step up its attention to concussions in the aftermath of a U.S. congressional hearing on the topic.

That included stricter return-to-play guidelines detailing what symptoms preclude someone from participating in games or practices; a mandate that each team select a league- and union-approved independent neurologist to be consulted when players get concussions; and the departure of the two co-chairmen of the NFL's committee on brain trauma.

At a U.S. House judiciary committee hearing Oct. 28, BU's Cantu said there is "growing and convincing evidence" that repetitive concussive and subconcussive hits to the head in NFL players leads to a degenerative brain disease.

Another co-director of the BU center, Ann McKee, showed the committee images of brains of dead football players with the disease and told legislators that "we need to take radical steps" to change the way football is played.