Can Science See Inside An NFL Player’s Skull Before It’s Too Late?

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Chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, is a diagnosis for dead people. Last month, Junior Seau was found in his apartment in Oceanside, California, with a fatal self-inflicted gunshot wound to the chest. A familiar sequence unfolded.

 

His brain was requested by both the Brain Injury Research Institute and Boston University’s Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy — the two main brain banks chasing damage in former football players. If the family consents, the brain will be sliced open and put under a microscope.

 

Given Seau’s profession and the nature of his demise, the expectation is that the tissues will show a buildup of a protein called tau, creating tangles like the ones found in victims of Alzheimer’s disease. But so what? It’s one more brain, to go with the 60-plus brains of former players who have already demonstrated postmortem signs of CTE.

 

The question, after a decade of brain-slicing autopsies, is when any of this will help players before they’re dead. Doctors can’t just crack open living patients’ skulls and lop off slices of their brains to stick under a microscope.

 

But new research at UCLA is using a cutting-edge biomarker that can attach itself to tau protein tangles so that they show up on PET scans of living subjects. Dr. Gary Small is currently running a pilot study on retired NFL players, imaging their brains in place. If he is successful, his work would reorient the science of head injuries around saving lives instead of merely contextualising deaths.

 

“I’ve always sort of thought of tau imaging as the holy grail on the issue of chronic brain damage, especially CTE,” said Dr Julian Bailes, one of the founders of the Brain Injury Research Institute (BIRI).

 

The grail isn’t in hand yet. But the marker that attaches to tau is among the most promising of an assortment of research projects seeking to make CTE something other than an after-the-fact conclusion. Tools to see CTE in living players, tests and techniques honed on other forms of brain damage that may be able to track the disease’s progress — science is trying to get inside the skull, before it’s too late.

 

 

 

 

 

Rest of the article: http://www.gizmodo.com.au/2012/06/can-science-see-inside-an-nfl-players-skull-before-its-too-late/

 

 

 

 

It goes pretty in-depth, but its a great read. Would be amazing if this technology could one day help to save lives, and not just in the NFL too.

 

 

 

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Good read. Thanks for sharing it.