(7 Sep 2017) What is CTE?
CTE stands for Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy.
Dr. Ann McKee at the Boston University School of Medicine goes over some of the possible causes.
SOUNDBITE (English) Dr. Ann McKee/Boston University School of Medicine
"CTE has been associated with repetitive head impacts, that is repetitive concussion and sub concussive injury in contact sport athletes, but also in military veterans."
The repetitive head impact linked with CTE impacts the brain.
SOUNDBITE (English) Dr. Ann McKee/Boston University School of Medicine
"So with repeated impact to the head, the brain inside the skull ricochets back and forth. It goes forward, accelerates and decelerates but it also goes rotationally and that causes the brain inside the skull to actually elongate and stretch and that stretching puts a lot of that physical force in that individual nerve cell, especially the neurons and the axons. And that can lead up to the buildup of Tau."
Tau is a definitive sign of CTE.
SOUNDBITE (English) Dr. Ann McKee/Boston University School of Medicine
"Tau is a normal protein in the brain. Normally its inside the nerve cell and it contributes to what we call the cytoskeleton or the skeleton of the cells. It helps hold up the cell shape.Under abnormal circumstances, like after trauma, like when the nerve cells when the cells are damaged, the TAU actually comes off those, comes off the skeleton. It comes off the microtubules and it starts clumping up and eventually it will kill the cell if enough builds up over time. "
Dr. Ann McKee dissects the brain to look for indications of CTE.
SOUNDBITE (English) Dr. Ann McKee/Boston University School of Medicine
"An individual in his forties, this is a former NFL player who is a person of large statue. You can see the ventricles, the areas of the brain that contain spinal fluid, they are enlarged. This thinning tends to be damaged more than the ventral aspect. That's something we've only really seen in CTE. We can see spaces near the hippocampus, which is part of the brain that is important for learning and for memory. And we can see there has been shrinkage there as well.To see this in such a young individual is quite startling. "
There are various types of behavior associated with CTE.
SOUNDBITE (English) Dr. Ann McKee/Neuropathologist/Boston University School of Medicine
"We see a lot of CTE lesions on the top and the lateral side or the frontal lobe, which is about two-thirds of the forward part of the brain. That's what leads to the symptoms and signs of CTE. There is loss of cognition, loss of memory, some behavioral and personality change and often mood changes like depression."
There are ways to preventing CTE
SOUNDBITE (English) Dr. Ann McKee/Neuropathologist/Boston University School of Medicine
"Well the real key to preventing CTE is preventing exposure to head impact. So anything an individual athlete can do to minimize the amount of head contact, the number of falls or blows. "
Researchers will continue to study CTE in order to figure out how to detect it in the future.
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