Whether you are gathering at a big Super Bowl party or staying at home to enjoy the game this Sunday, there is something way more important to contemplate than Bill Belichick’s potentially “deflated” ego. br
A just-released study of former NFL players has revealed the specifics of concussive ain damage.
A team of Johns Hopkins specialists, using a battery of imaging and cognitive tests, has gathered evidence of accumulated ain damage that could be linked to specific memory deficits in former National Football League (NFL) players experienced decades after they stopped playing the game.
The results of the small study of nine men provide further evidence of potential long-term neurological risk to football players who sustain repeated concussions, and support calls for better player protections.
“We’re hoping that our findings are going to further inform the game,” says Jennifer Coughlin, M.D., assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. “That may mean individuals are able to make more educated decisions about whether they’re susceptible to ain injury, advise how helmets are structured, or inform guidelines for the game to better protect players.”
Several anecdotal accounts and studies have suggested that athletes, such as collegiate and professional football, hockey, and soccer players, exposed to repeat concussions, could suffer permanent ain damage and deficits from these events. However, the mechanism of damage and the source of these deficits have been unclear.
To reveal them, Coughlin; Yuchuan Wang, Ph.D., assistant professor of radiology and radiological science at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine; and their colleagues used tests to directly detect deficits and to quantify localized molecular differences between the ains of former players and healthy people who didn’t play football.
According to the Hopkins press release dated January 21st, the researchers recruited nine former NFL players who retired decades ago and ranged in age from 57 to 74. The men had played a variety of team positions and had a wide range of self-reported, historical concussions, varying from none for a running back to 40 for a defensive tackle. The researchers also recruited nine age-matched “controls”—healthy individuals who had no reason to suspect they had ain injuries.
While the control volunteers’ tests showed no evidence of ain damage, PET scans showed that on average, the group of former NFL players had evidence of ain injury in several temporal medial lobe regions, including the amygdala, a region that plays a significant role in regulating mood. Imaging also identified injuries in many players’ supramarginal gyrus, an area linked to verbal memory.
While the hippocampus, an area that plays a role in several aspects of memory, didn’t show evidence of damage in the PET scans, MRIs of the former players’ ains showed atrophy of the right-side hippocampus, suggesting that this region may have shrunk in size due to previous damage.
Additionally, the study revealed that many of the NFL players scored low on memory testing, particularly in tests of verbal learning and memory.
Though the researchers emphasize that this pilot study, published in the Fe uary 2015 issue of the journal Neurobiology of Disease, is small in size, they say that the evidence among just nine former NFL player s suggests that there are molecular and structural changes in specific ain regions of athletes who have a history of repetitive hits to the head, even many years after they’ve left active play.
--Sarah Hagerty
