Researchers at the University of Calgary say they have developed a portable brain-imaging system that would literally shed light on concussions. Symptoms of a concussion can vary greatly between individuals and include headaches, nausea, loss of memory and lack of co-ordination, which make it difficult to find treatment options. U of C scientist Jeff Dunn says there has been no accepted way to get an image of a concussion, but he and his team have developed a device, called a Near-Infrared Spectroscopy, that measures communication in the brain by measuring oxygen levels in blood. Results show these patterns change after concussion. The device — a cap that contains small lights with sensors connected to a computer — is placed on the top of the head to monitor and measure brain activity while the patient looks at a picture or does a simple activity. "When the brain activates, blood flow goes up but oxygen levels also go up, so the blood actually becomes redder as the brain activates," Dunn said. "And we measure that so we shine a light in and we can see that change in oxygen level and measure the change in absorption." Dunn hopes the images will show a connection between symptoms and abnormalities in the brain that could help doctors identify treatment protocols and recovery timelines. ©2018 CBC/Radio-Canada

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 19: Language and Lateralization; Chapter 2: Functional Neuroanatomy: The Cells and Structure of the Nervous System
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 15: Language and Lateralization; Chapter 1: Cells and Structures: The Anatomy of the Nervous System
Link ID: 24754 - Posted: 03.15.2018

By GINA KOLATA A group of American diplomats stationed in Havana appear to have symptoms of concussion without ever having received blows to their heads, medical experts have found. The diplomats originally were said to have been victims of a “sonic attack,” a possibility that the Federal Bureau of Investigation reportedly ruled out in January. The experts’ report, published late Wednesday in the journal JAMA, does not solve the mystery, instead raising even more questions about what could have caused the brain injuries. The incidents occurred in 2016, when 18 of the 21 affected diplomats reported they heard strange sounds in their homes or hotel rooms. The noises were loud and sounded like buzzing or grinding metal, or piercing squeals or humming, the diplomats recalled. Many said they felt increased air pressure, as if they were riding in a car with the windows rolled partway down. Three diplomats said they felt a vibration. All but one reported immediate symptoms: headache, pain in one ear, loss of hearing. Days or weeks later, other symptoms emerged, including memory problems, an inability to concentrate, mood problems, headaches and fatigue. The State Department asked researchers at the University of Pennsylvania to investigate. Their report confirmed neurological problems in the diplomats, including signs of what appear to be concussions. “The study was conducted by the top concussion research team in the world utilizing state-of-the-art methods,” said C. Edward Dixon, a professor of neurological surgery at the University of Pittsburgh, who was not involved in the research. The findings suggest “a significant brain insult,” he said. © 2018 The New York Times Company

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 19: Language and Lateralization
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 15: Language and Lateralization
Link ID: 24671 - Posted: 02.16.2018

By Richard Stone U.S. diplomats who fell ill in Cuba are victims of a new neurological syndrome, according to brain researchers at the University of Pennsylvania. But the team was unable to shed light on the malady’s mysterious cause, which the U.S. State Department has characterized as a “health attack.” From late 2016 through August 2017, as many as 24 U.S. citizens affiliated with the U.S. Embassy in Havana reported symptoms ranging from vertigo and sleeplessness to cognitive impairment. Many described hearing loud or disconcerting sounds before the onset of symptoms, or pressure sensations in their ears akin to the baffling that occurs in a moving car with the windows cracked open. “They felt something weird going on,” and when they moved away from the perceived exposure, some of “the symptoms abated,” says Douglas Smith, director of Penn’s Center for Brain Injury and Repair. The State Department called in the Penn group after initial examinations of diplomats at the University of Miami in Florida revealed persistent and inexplicable symptoms. The Penn team’s report on the diplomats’ health appears in today’s issue of The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). The coincidence of the diplomats’ impairment and the auditory phenomena fueled speculation they were victims of a “sonic attack.” Last summer, citing what it saw as Cuba’s inability to protect U.S. diplomats, the State Department pulled most of its personnel out of Cuba and expelled from the U.S. a corresponding number of Cuban diplomats. The Cuban government has denied knowledge of an attack and has cooperated with the U.S. investigation, which is being spearheaded by the FBI. © 2018 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 19: Language and Lateralization
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 15: Language and Lateralization
Link ID: 24670 - Posted: 02.16.2018

By SHEILA KAPLAN and KEN BELSON The Food and Drug Administration on Wednesday approved a long-awaited blood test to detect concussions in people and more quickly identify those with possible brain injuries. The test, called the Banyan Brain Trauma Indicator, is also expected to reduce the number of people exposed to radiation through CT scans, or computed tomography scans, that detect brain tissue damage or intracranial lesions. If the blood test is adopted widely, it could eliminate the need for CT scans in at least a third of those with suspected brain injuries, the agency predicted. Concussion-related brain damage has become a particularly worrisome public health issue in many sports, especially football, affecting the ranks of professional athletes on down to the young children in Pop Warner leagues. Those concerns have escalated so far that it has led to a decline in children participating in tackle sports. “This is going to change the testing paradigm for suspected cases of concussion,” said Tara Rabin, a spokeswoman for the F.D.A. She noted that the agency had worked closely on the application with the Defense Department, which has wanted a diagnostic tool to evaluate wounded soldiers in combat zones. The Pentagon financed a 2,000-person clinical trial that led to the test’s approval. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there were about 2.8 million visits to emergency rooms for traumatic brain injury-related conditions in 2013, the most recent year for which the numbers were available. Of these, nearly 50,000 people died. Most patients with suspected traumatic brain injury are evaluated using a neurological exam, followed by a CT scan. © 2018 The New York Times Company

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 19: Language and Lateralization
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 15: Language and Lateralization
Link ID: 24663 - Posted: 02.15.2018

By Brian Resnick Football isn’t just a contact sport — it’s a dangerous game of massive bodies colliding into one another. And while it may seem obvious that this sport can do extraordinary damage to brains and bodies, it’s taken far too long for the NFL, the medical community, and football fans to fully reckon with this. And there’s no question that the legacy — and persistent threat — of brain injuries will haunt this Sunday’s Super Bowl match between the New England Patriots and the Philadelphia Eagles. The Patriots’ star tight end, Rob Gronkowski, was only cleared earlier this week for play after sustaining a concussion in the NFL Conference Championships win over the Jacksonville Jaguars on January 21. On game day, the NFL will have in place four concussion specialists around the field to ensure player safety. Even halftime performer Justin Timberlake told reporters his 3-year-old son will never play football, though it wasn’t entirely clear if he was joking. Doctors have learned a tremendous amount about concussions and chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, a degenerative brain condition believed to be caused by repeated hits to the head, since the first former NFL player was diagnosed with CTE in the early 2000s. Concern around the issue has only grown now that more than 100 former NFL players have received a postmortem diagnosis of CTE. All the evidence we now have about the very serious risk of brain injuries in football casts a dim light on the future of the sport.

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 19: Language and Lateralization
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 15: Language and Lateralization
Link ID: 24614 - Posted: 02.05.2018

By EMILY KELLY My husband, Rob Kelly, is a retired N.F.L. player. After five seasons as a safety beginning in the late 1990s, four with the New Orleans Saints and one with the New England Patriots, he sustained an injury to a nerve between his neck and shoulder during training camp that ended his career. By the time he retired in 2002 at 28, he had been playing tackle football for about two decades. Rob had no idea, however, that all those years of playing would have such serious consequences. Safeties are the last line of defense and among the hardest hitters in the game. One tackle he attempted while playing for the Saints was so damaging, he doesn’t remember the rest of the game. He got up, ran off the field and tried to go back in — as an offensive player. He knows this only because people told him the next day. Professional football is a brutal sport, he knew that. But he loved it anyway. And he accepted the risks of bruises and broken bones. What he didn’t know was that along with a battered body can come a battered mind. For decades, it was not well understood that football can permanently harm the brain. Otherwise, many parents would most likely not have signed their boys up to play. But this reality was obscured by the N.F.L.’s top medical experts, who for years had denied any link between the sport and long-term degenerative brain diseases like chronic traumatic encephalopathy. That started to change in late 2009 when, for the first time, the N.F.L. publicly acknowledged that concussions can have long-term effects. In 2016, a top league official admitted that there is a connection between football and C.T.E., which has now been found in the brains of more than 100 deceased players. But for Rob, and countless other players, those admissions came too late. © 2018 The New York Times Company

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 19: Language and Lateralization
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 15: Language and Lateralization
Link ID: 24613 - Posted: 02.05.2018

By Katie Langin Woodpeckers repeatedly whack their heads against trees with a force 10 times that of a concussion-inducing football tackle, yet they seem no worse for the wear. That has inspired some athletic companies to model helmets and neck collars on the head-banging birds. But woodpeckers may not be immune to head trauma after all. A new study shows that a protein whose abnormal buildup is considered a sign of human brain damage also accumulates in woodpecker brains. That raises an intriguing question: Could the newly discovered “tangles” of this protein, tau, be protecting the woodpecker brain from injury? The idea of concussionless woodpeckers dates back to 1976, when a seminal study that examined sections of the birds’ brains found no evidence of injury. That research spurred “a cascade of papers” on woodpecker biomechanics and their force-resisting adaptations, says George Farah, a neurobiologist at Boston University. Because the old study used an outdated staining method to reveal damage in the brain, he and his colleagues decided to redo the work with 21st century technology. They asked several museums for woodpecker specimens whose brains they could study. Their final haul: six downy woodpeckers, one yellow-bellied sapsucker, one northern flicker, one pale-billed woodpecker, and one lineated woodpecker. For comparison, they also got five brains from a non–head-banging species, the red-winged blackbird. © 2018 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 19: Language and Lateralization
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 15: Language and Lateralization
Link ID: 24610 - Posted: 02.03.2018

By Viviane Callier People who experience blast-related trauma to the brain, a condition that has become more and more common among combat veterans, can later experience depression and heightened anxiety, even in the absence of a psychological stressor. Patients are usually treated with medications (particularly antidepressants) and behavioral therapy, but these are often only partially effective. In search of a more-effective drug, researchers have found that a compound that blocks certain glutamate receptors in the brain reverses many of the post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)-like symptoms that appear after rats endure a blast injury, they report in eNeuro this week (January 29). The drug, called BCI-838, is already in human clinical trials for the treatment of depression. “What makes this paper a really nice addition to the literature is that it comes from a good group that over the years has honed and refined a very legitimate, biologically relevant, and battlefield-relevant animal model,” says David Cook, who studies neurodegenerative disease at the VA Puget Sound and the University of Washington and who was not involved in the study. “This compound, which has plausibility for clinical use, was quite efficacious in ameliorating the PTSD-like symptoms that were caused by blast exposure a long time afterwards. This is the kind of stuff everyone is looking for.” Recent improvements in body armor have increased the chance that military personnel survive blast exposures that, a few years ago, would have killed them. But the result is that mild, repetitive TBI has become a signature wound of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, explains Cook. It isn’t unusual to encounter veterans who have been exposed to—and survived—more than 100 blasts, he says. © 1986-2018 The Scientist

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 19: Language and Lateralization; Chapter 16: Psychopathology: Biological Basis of Behavior Disorders
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 15: Language and Lateralization; Chapter 12: Psychopathology: The Biology of Behavioral Disorders
Link ID: 24608 - Posted: 02.03.2018

By GRETCHEN REYNOLDS When a teenager is hit in the head, his brain can begin to show signs, within days, of the kind of damage associated with degenerative brain disease, according to an unsettling new study of young men and head injuries. The findings, which also involve tests with animals, indicate that this damage can occur even if the hit does not result in a full-blown concussion. With the Super Bowl taking place on Sunday, the issue of head impacts is on many of our minds. It is well known, of course, that some deceased football players’ brains have shown tissue damage and spreading clumps of a protein called tau that can strangle and kill brain cells. This brain condition, called chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or C.T.E., is thought to be caused by blows to the head, including the kind of impacts that occur frequently during tackle football and other contact sports. These impacts often lead to a concussion, a brain injury characterized by a multitude of symptoms, such as headaches, dizziness, wobbly balance and changes in attention and memory. For many of us who watch, play or are the parents of young athletes in contact sports, concussions are a great and growing concern. But surprisingly little is conclusively known about the relationships between head impacts, concussions and C.T.E., or about how quickly or slowly a head injury might begin to shade into early signs of disease. Those precise questions have gripped a large and distinguished group of scientists at Boston University School of Medicine and many other institutions around the world. These researchers were among the first to identify C.T.E. in the brains of football players and later in soldiers who had experienced blast injuries to their heads. Their work has established strong links between such hits to the head and later C.T.E. But for the small new study, which was published recently in Brain, they hoped to learn more about how and how quickly such injuries might contribute to the disease. © 2018 The New York Times Company

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 19: Language and Lateralization; Chapter 7: Life-Span Development of the Brain and Behavior
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 15: Language and Lateralization; Chapter 4: Development of the Brain
Link ID: 24595 - Posted: 01.31.2018

By David Kohn Each year, thousands of Americans suffer a traumatic brain injury. In 2013, about 2.8 million TBI-related emergency department visits, hospitalizations and deaths occurred in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Most of these are what are called mild traumatic brain injuries, or mTBIs — head injuries that don’t cause a coma. People with an mTBI typically get better within a few weeks, but for as many as 20 percent, problems can linger for months or years. Many of these patients find themselves stuck with depression, cognitive problems, headaches, fatigue and other symptoms. Known as post-concussion syndrome, this phenomenon is often difficult to treat. Antidepressants can lift moods, painkillers can ease headaches and physical therapy may ease dizziness, but most researchers agree that these remedies don’t heal the injury within the brain. Could oxygen do the trick? A growing group of scientists and physicians say that hyperbaric treatment, which exposes patients to pure oxygen at higher-than-normal air pressure, may work. “These patients don’t have enough oxygen to heal the injured parts of their brains,” said Shai Efrati, a researcher and physician at Tel Aviv University in Israel and a leading hyperbaric scientist. “Hyperbaric treatment massively increases the amount of oxygen available to the brain.” But other researchers believe that the treatment has no merit and should not be recommended. © 1996-2018 The Washington Post

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 19: Language and Lateralization
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 15: Language and Lateralization
Link ID: 24583 - Posted: 01.29.2018

Tom Goldman We live in an age of heightened awareness about concussions. From battlefields around the world to football fields in the U.S., we've heard about the dangers caused when the brain rattles around inside the skull and the possible link between concussions and the degenerative brain disease chronic traumatic encephalopathy. A number of high-profile NFL stars have developed CTE, and parents are increasingly worried about how concussions may affect their children who play sports. The injury even has become part of popular culture, thanks to the 2015 film Concussion. But now a high-powered team of researchers says all that focus on concussions may be missing the mark. It's really about hits A study published online Thursday in Brain, a journal of neurology, presents the strongest case yet that repetitive hits to the head that don't lead to concussions —meaning no loss of consciousness or other symptoms that can include headaches, dizziness, vision problems or confusion — cause CTE. "We've had an inkling that subconcussive hits — the ones that don't [show] neurological signs and symptoms — may be associated with CTE," says Dr. Lee Goldstein, an associate professor of psychiatry at the Boston University School of Medicine and the lead investigator on the study. "We now have solid scientific evidence to say that is so." And this evidence, he says, leaves researchers "terrifically concerned." © 2018 npr

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 19: Language and Lateralization
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 15: Language and Lateralization
Link ID: 24537 - Posted: 01.19.2018

By Melissa McCradden Do girls take longer than boys to recover after a concussion? A recent study of middle- and high school athletes they found that the female athletes took twice as long to be symptom-free as the male athletes. Shockingly, the female athletes took nearly a full month to report being symptom-free, while the male athletes took less than two weeks. It was reported widely across the media as evidence the young women may have a special problem with concussions. This conclusion, unfortunately, is not well supported. Meta-analyses (which look at the full body of literature on a topic) have found conflicting evidence regarding male-female differences in concussion recovery. Consensus statements on sport-related concussion have not deemed there to be sufficient reason to distinguish between the genders for return-to-play protocols or guidelines on handling the injury. And the study itself has important flaws. There are hundreds of thousands of female athletes who have scholarships, professional careers, and Olympic hopes at stake, and let’s not forget the basic principle that our girls deserve equal opportunity as the boys to participate in sports. These conclusions have real consequences, and we need to get our information right. One of the strongest predictive factors for prolonged post-concussion symptoms is expectation of recovery—those who believe they will recover quickly are more likely to do so. So if we label women in this way, it can have a direct, negative effect on their recovery from concussion. © 2017 Scientific American

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 19: Language and Lateralization; Chapter 12: Sex: Evolutionary, Hormonal, and Neural Bases
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 15: Language and Lateralization; Chapter 8: Hormones and Sex
Link ID: 24444 - Posted: 12.20.2017

By Daniel J. Levitin One evening in April, driving home from a university function, I was stopped in freeway traffic caused by roadworks somewhere up ahead when I felt a massive jolt. The back of my head hit the headrest, then my head lurched forward and I felt something hit the inside of my forehead with a squishy blow. Then my head snapped back and slammed into the headrest a second time. I didn’t feel any pain at first, just a stunned sense of disruption. As a neuroscientist, I know a bit about traumatic brain injury and concussions. Sitting on the freeway, I went through a quick checklist in my mind: I hadn’t blacked out. I wasn’t dizzy or nauseated. This meant that it was unlikely I’d slip into a coma or lose consciousness in the critical next few hours. But I could feel a dull ache in the cerebellum, where my head had hit the headrest. If the impact had been any higher up, I thought, in the occipital lobe, I might have lost my sight or experienced hallucinations. The squishy sensation, I suspected, was likely my prefrontal cortex pushing against the viscous fluid that keeps it from the bone of my skull. I did not want to move yet. I wanted to just sit. The young woman who hit me walked up to my window and asked if I was all right. She was clutching her cell phone. I wondered if she had been texting while driving. I knew that going to the E.R. would likely be pointless: concussions don’t leave any evidence that can be seen in CT scans and MRIs, and newer markers—cerebral spinal fluid and blood draws—are still being evaluated. © 2017 Condé Nast

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 19: Language and Lateralization
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 15: Language and Lateralization
Link ID: 24359 - Posted: 11.25.2017

Richard Gonzales The Boston researcher who examined the brain of former football star Aaron Hernandez says it showed the most damage her team had seen in an athlete so young. Hernandez, whose on-field performance for the New England Patriots earned him a $40 million contract in 2012, hanged himself in a prison cell earlier this year while serving a life sentence for murder. He was 27 years old. Dr. Ann McKee, a neuropathologist who directs research of chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, at Boston University, said her research team found Hernandez had Stage 3 CTE and that they had never seen such severe damage in a brain younger than 46 years old. McKee announced her findings at medical conference on Thursday in Boston where she spoke publicly for the first time. Dr. Ann McKee of Boston University talks about the severe degenerative brain disease suffered by former NFL star Aaron Hernandez. Her research team examined his brain after Hernandez died from suicide in prison. Among the lingering questions in the sports world and among brain researchers is, why did a young man with wealth, fame and a potentially bright athletic career ahead of him kill a friend and wind up in prison? © 2017 npr

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 19: Language and Lateralization
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 15: Language and Lateralization
Link ID: 24313 - Posted: 11.10.2017

By JANE E. BRODY I will start this column with its conclusion: Riding a bicycle without wearing a properly fitted helmet is simply stupid. Anyone who does so is tempting fate, risking a potentially life-changing disaster. And that goes for all users of bike-share programs, like New York’s Citi Bike, who think nothing of pulling a bike from its station and cycling helmetless on streets, with and without bike lanes, among often reckless traffic on foot and wheels. Even a careful cyclist is likely to crash about once every 4,500 miles and, based on personal observation, many city cyclists are anything but careful. Although reliable details are lacking on bike share accidents in New York or elsewhere, one shattering statistic reported by New York City for cyclists in general stands out: 97 percent of cycling deaths and 87 percent of serious injuries occurred to people who were not wearing helmets. Head injuries account for three-fourths of the nearly 700-plus bicycle deaths that occur each year nationwide, and helmets can prevent or reduce the severity of these injuries in two-thirds of cases, according to the Bicycle Helmet Safety Institute, a nonprofit organization based in Arlington, Va. This protection holds even in crashes with motor vehicles, researchers from the University of Washington in Seattle reported as long ago as 2000, a statistic verified many times since. I’ve been a cyclist for more than 70 years, most of them before anyone thought about wearing a helmet (protective helmets for recreational cyclists didn’t even exist until 1975). Although I’ve owned many helmets in the last four decades, I admit to occasionally not wearing one to avoid “helmet hair” before an evening out. © 2017 The New York Times Company

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 19: Language and Lateralization
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 15: Language and Lateralization
Link ID: 24230 - Posted: 10.23.2017

Aimee Cunningham To guard against the dangers of concussions, by 2014, all 50 states and the District of Columbia had enacted laws to protect young athletes. More than 2½ years after these laws went on the books, repeat concussions began to decline among high school athletes, researchers report online October 19 in the American Journal of Public Health. Researchers reviewed concussion data from 2005 to 2016 collected in an online system for sports injuries from a nationally representative sample of U.S. high schools. An estimated nearly 2.7 million reported concussions occurred during that time — an annual average of 39.8 concussions per 100,000 times a player hit the field for practice or games — among athletes in nine sports: football, basketball, soccer, baseball or wrestling for boys, and basketball, soccer, softball and volleyball for girls. Overall, the rate of new and recurrent concussions was climbing before the implementation of traumatic brain injury laws and continued to rise immediately after. But then, 2.6 years after the laws went into effect, the rate of recurrent concussions dropped roughly 10 percent, the authors say. New concussions showed a slight downturn beginning 3.8 years post-law. Most of the new laws require education on symptoms and signs of concussions for athletes, coaches and parents. So greater awareness of symptoms rather than an actual uptick in injuries may be behind the initial increase in reported concussions in the post-statute period. And the drop in recurrent concussions may be due to the laws’ provisions that take athletes off the field after a concussion and keep them off until approved by a medical provider. While the trends suggest that laws are having an impact, the researchers say, measures that focus on preventing concussions — not only taking steps after they happen — are needed. |© Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2017.

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 19: Language and Lateralization
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 15: Language and Lateralization
Link ID: 24220 - Posted: 10.20.2017

By GRETCHEN REYNOLDS Here’s yet another reason to protect young athletes from head trauma: A large-scale new study found that concussions in adolescents can increase the risk of later developing multiple sclerosis. The risk of multiple sclerosis, or M.S., an autoimmune nervous system disorder with an unknown cause, was especially high if there were more than one head injury. The overall chances that a young athlete who has had one or more head injuries will develop multiple sclerosis still remain low, the study’s authors point out. But the risk is significantly higher than if a young person never experiences a serious blow to the head. The drumbeat of worrying news about concussions and their consequences has been rising in recent years, as most of us know, especially if we have children who play contact sports. Much of this concern has centered on possible links between repeated concussions and chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a serious, degenerative brain disease that affects the ability to think. But there have been hints that head trauma might also be linked to the development of other conditions, including multiple sclerosis. Past studies with animals have shown that trauma to the central nervous system, including the brain, may jump-start the kind of autoimmune reactions that underlie multiple sclerosis. (In the disease, the body’s immune system begins to attack the fatty sheaths that enwrap and protect nerve fibers, leaving them vulnerable to damage and scarring.) © 2017 The New York Times Company

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 19: Language and Lateralization; Chapter 3: Neurophysiology: The Generation, Transmission, and Integration of Neural Signals
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 15: Language and Lateralization; Chapter 2: Neurophysiology: The Generation, Transmission, and Integration of Neural Signals
Link ID: 24219 - Posted: 10.19.2017

By Rebecca Robbins, LAS VEGAS — It’s a study that probably couldn’t be conducted anywhere other than this hot spot for professional combatants, where marquee fights are about as common as Celine Dion concerts. Researchers have enrolled close to 700 mixed martial arts fighters and boxers, both active and retired, in the past six years. The ambitious goal: to learn to identify early signs of trauma-induced brain damage from subtle changes in blood chemistry, brain imaging, and performance tests — changes that may show up decades before visible symptoms such as cognitive impairment, depression, and impulsive behavior. Among the participants is 29-year-old Gina Mazany. She has a streak of pinkish-purple hair, a tattoo of a pterodactyl with a cheeseburger in its beak, and a reputation as a formidable MMA fighter worthy of her nickname, Gina Danger. Once a year, she undergoes a battery of medical tests here at the Lou Ruvo Center for Brain Health, an outpost of the Cleveland Clinic, to help suss out the toll of a career marked by concussions and blows to the head. “I’m one of their guinea pigs,” she said. Last month, researchers at Boston University made a splash when they identified high levels of a protein called CCL11 in the brain and spinal fluid of deceased football players with the degenerative brain disease known as chronic traumatic encephalopathy. Cleveland Clinic researchers are taking a different tack: They’re monitoring professional fighters while they’re still alive — and, most of the time, while they’re still fighting. By repeating a series of tests year after year, they hope to pick up on changes that might predict development of CTE. © 2017 Scientific American

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 19: Language and Lateralization
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 15: Language and Lateralization
Link ID: 24209 - Posted: 10.18.2017

By Diana Kwon Recovering from a concussion typically takes female athletes more than twice as long as males, according to a new study that tracked hundreds of teenagers active in sports. The finding adds to a growing body of evidence that vulnerability to this injury—and aspects of the healing process—may vary by sex. A handful of studies published since the mid-2000s have suggested that girls in high school and college may sustain a higher rate of these injuries on the playing field than boys do, and investigations over the last few years have indicated they may also take longer to recover. As a result, when sports medicine researchers and experts convened in Berlin last fall for the 5th International Consensus Conference on Concussion in Sport, their subsequent statement cited evidence girls were more likely to suffer concussions that required a more lengthy recovery period than their male counterparts did. “But there wasn’t enough data to [definitively] say that this was the case,” says John Neidecker, a sports medicine physician with the Orthopaedic Specialists of North Carolina. “We thought that we'd take a look back at the athletes that we saw over a three-year period and actually [provide] some objective data.” Neidecker and his colleagues analyzed the medical records of 212 middle and high school athletes who visited a sports medicine practice in southern New Jersey—110 boys and 102 girls—who had experienced their first concussion while playing an organized sport such as football, field hockey or wrestling. (Only initial head injuries were considered to rule out the possible effect of prior incidents.) Their analysis revealed the median recovery time for girls was 28 days—more than double that of boys, which was 11 days. The results appeared Monday inThe Journal of the © 2017 Scientific American

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 19: Language and Lateralization; Chapter 12: Sex: Evolutionary, Hormonal, and Neural Bases
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 15: Language and Lateralization; Chapter 8: Hormones and Sex
Link ID: 24142 - Posted: 10.03.2017

By PERRI KLASS, M.D. More than 30 years ago, my toddler stood up in his stroller, evading the various belts and restraints, and took a dramatic header down onto the pavement. He cried right away — a good thing, because it meant he didn’t lose consciousness, and by the time we got home, he seemed to be consoled, though he was already developing a major goose egg. I was a fourth-year medical student at the time and called the pediatric practice at University Health Services, and explained, somewhat frantically, that I was due to get on a flight to California with him in a couple of hours; I was going out for my all-important residency interviews. No problem, said the sympathetic doctor on call, all those years ago. You’re a medical student, you must have a penlight. Just take it along on the plane, and make sure you wake your son up every two hours and check that his pupils are equal, round and reactive to light. And he wished me good luck at my interviews. I hung up, much comforted. It was not until we were sitting on the airplane, me with my penlight in my pocket, that it occurred to me to wonder what I was supposed to do if somewhere over the Midwest, his pupils were not equal, round and reactive. We’ve gotten better, I hope, at some of the advice we give, but for pediatricians and for parents, head trauma in children is still an occasion for difficult decision making. Unlike broken limbs, usually detected because of pain and clearly diagnosed with X-rays, head injuries are tricky to diagnose and manage. In many cases where the concern is concussion, there is no medication or surgery that can make a difference — the primary treatment is rest. Public awareness over the ties between concussions and later problems for children, and publicity about chronic traumatic encephalopathy in athletes may be making parents even more anxious about treating head injuries. But with increasing concern in recent years about the radiation risk to children of CT scans, doing a head CT just to reassure a worried parent — or even a worried doctor — is generally seen as bad medicine; if you’re giving a child a significant dose of possibly dangerous radiation, you need to have some evidence that you may actually be doing something necessary for that child’s safety. © 2017 The New York Times Company

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 19: Language and Lateralization; Chapter 7: Life-Span Development of the Brain and Behavior
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 15: Language and Lateralization; Chapter 4: Development of the Brain
Link ID: 24135 - Posted: 10.02.2017