Neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and Huntington’s disease, can be caused by many different factors. But from all the pathologies we discussed in class this past week, the one thing that sparked my interest into doing more research was how some of these diseases can be caused by high impact sports. This may include sports such as Hockey, Boxing, and Football.
Back in 2008, Boston University School of Medicine and Sports Legacy Institute partnered up to begin an intensive look into how chronic head injuries may cause neurodegenerative diseases later on in a players life. Thus the Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy was formed.
This center conducts state of the art research on Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE), which is a disease that leads to a highly progressive dementia. Some of the early symptoms that may appear during the athlete’s career are memory loss, depression and personality changes. All of these symptoms get worse and worse over the years and eventually leads to dementia.
The continual onset of trauma to the brain triggers a progressive degeneration of the tissue, including the build up of an abnormal protein called tau. When a brain sample has been collected after the person has passed away, the researchers can stain for that specific protein and can visualize where dead brain matter has occurred.
For more information on this ongoing research, go to this website http://www.bu.edu/cste/
Here they have a nice video explaining overall research findings and what they hope to do in the future. There is also a review article that discusses CTE in more detail if you click on the About tab and then What is CTE. Its near the bottom of the page.
I think that it is very realistic that neurodegenerative diseases can be caused by high impact sports especially boxing and football. It is very easy to see that these sports can be very harmful to the body in many ways and especially the head. It is interesting that the symptoms that may appears during the athletes life are memory loss, personality change and depression. Why would one suffer from depression??
ReplyDeleteI also was wondering more about the protein tau when reading this blog. After reading a little bit more into the protein I found that the infectious properties in the tau protein cause particles known as "neurofibrillary tangles" to build up in the brain cells. If anyone has any good information on this protein please share it. I would really appreciate it.
Thanks for posting this article, I really enjoyed reading it! It is interesting how continual onsets of trauma to brain can cause morphological changes to brain so that we do see progressive degeneration of the tissue that could eventually lead to dementia. I know I sometimes accidently bump my head on things, of course not to the degree of head injuries sustained by some athletes, but they could eventually add up and this really makes me think I should be more careful with my head.
ReplyDeleteTo Lisa, the reasons that they believe people suffer from depression is due to direct damage to brain that causes changes to their brain structure such basal ganglia and frontostrial tracts or it could just be a from a response to the brain damage.
http://archpsyc.ama-assn.org/cgi/reprint/59/1/17.pdf
Also I found some interesting information about the protein tau, it is believed that it is involved in the pathogenesis of Alzheimer’s disease. Here’s a link to the article:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2002/05/020507073512.htm