Post-traumatic stress disorder changes lives for the worse in people exposed to violent episodes. Many sufferers have contracted PTSD from repeated hits to the head in contact sports such as American football. Medically, that form is termed chronic traumatic encephalopathy. Parts of the syndrome resemble Alzheimer’s disease, including accumulation of an abnormal tau protein in the brain.
It’s puzzling that some players get CTE and some do not. A recent review by Guanlan Dong and 17 colleagues at Harvard reports a closer look at neurons in 15 sufferers and 4 people who had repetitive head impacts but did not get CTE. The team looked at genetic mutations in neurons from the front of the brain, the prefrontal cortex. Now, mutations keep occurring in our individual cells over our lives from DNA copying errors, cosmic rays, chemical exposure… and head impacts.
The pattern of mutations differed notably between individuals with and without CTE. The interpretation is that other mechanisms in nerves differ between them. If I may speculate, we may eventually have diagnostics, perhaps genetic, to discern who’s susceptible to CTE and who isn’t. Might people choose their sport?
This has been an outreach activity of the Las Cruces Academy, viewable at GreatSchools.org.
Source: Science, 30 October, p. 493
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