(Press-News.org) The brain scans of high school football and hockey players showed subtle injury -- even if they did not suffer a concussion – after taking routine hits to the head during the normal course of play, according to a University of Rochester Medical Center study.
The research, reported online in the journal Magnetic Resonance Imaging, is preliminary, involving a small sample of athletes, but nonetheless raises powerful questions about the consequences of the mildest head injury among youths with developing brains, said lead author Jeffrey Bazarian, M.D., M.P.H., associate professor of Emergency Medicine at URMC with a special interest in sports concussions.
Bazarian and colleagues used a cutting edge statistical approach to analyze before-and-after images of the players' brains from diffusion tensor imaging (DTI). A DTI scan is similar to an MRI but it does not relay pictures, rather it captures and relays quantitative data that must be decoded and interpreted.
Collaborators and co-authors Tong Zhu, Ph.D., and Jianhui Zhong, Ph.D., uniquely applied a novel (wild bootstrap) statistical method to the DTI imaging study and detected the small but noteworthy changes in the white matter of the teenagers.
"Although this was a very small study, if confirmed it could have broad implications for youth sports," Bazarian said. "The challenge is to determine whether a critical number of head hits exists above which this type of brain injury appears, and then to get players and coaches to agree to limit play when an athlete approached that number."
Nine athletes and six people in a control group from Rochester, N.Y., volunteered to take part in the research during the 2006-2007 sports season. Among the nine athletes, only one was diagnosed with a sports-related concussion that season, but six others sustained many sub-concussive blows and showed abnormalities on their post-season DTI scans that were closer to the concussed brain than to the normal brains in the control group.
The imaging changes also strongly correlated with the number of head hits (self-reported in a diary), the symptoms experienced, and independent of cognitive test results, Bazarian said.
The URMC study is unique because it was able to compare brain scans from the same player, pre-season and post-season. Most other studies compare the injured brain of one person to the normal brain of another person from a control group. However, that becomes a problem when searching for very subtle changes, Bazarian said, because so much natural variation exists in every individual's brain.
Indeed, among athletes there is no easy, objective way to diagnose concussions. High schools, colleges, and professional programs routinely administer pre-season, computer-based cognitive tests. Yet some athletes have become adept at tricking the test, Bazarian said. They intentionally do poorly on the baseline so that a mild concussion will not show up if re-tested later.
The DTI scan provides detailed information of axonal injury at the cellular level, by measuring the motion of water in the brain. Axons, which are like cables woven throughout brain tissue, swell up when injury occurs. As the swelling impacts the movement of water, scientists can measure changes in flow and volume and thus make an educated guess at the extent of axonal injury.
Measurements in the study at hand showed many changes in the brain of the player with the diagnosed concussion; however an intermediate level of changes also occurred among the players who reported anywhere from 26 to 399 total sub-concussive blows. The fewest changes occurred in the control group, as expected.
A key objective of the study was to determine if this statistical approach worked, and the preliminary results showed that white matter changes among the intermediate group were three times higher than the controls.
Efforts to further understand the significance of study results are already underway. Bazarian and collaborators at the Rochester Center for Brain Imaging, the URMC Department of Emergency Medicine, Department of Athletics and Recreation, and the Department of Imaging Sciences, are working on an NFL-funded study of UR football players this fall. Ten players agreed to wear helmets with special sensors that objectively detect the number of head hits they sustain, the velocity and angle. Each player is also receiving a pre-season and 2 post-season DTI scans, and the data downloaded from the helmet sensors will be correlated with information from the images.
"Our studies are taking important steps toward personalized medicine for traumatic brain injury," Bazarian said. "In the future we'd like to be able to have a baseline image of a brain and clearly know the significance of changes that occur later."
INFORMATION:
Funding was provided by the National Institutes of Health and the UR Health Sciences Center for Computational Innovation.
END
PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — In a new study, scientists report that they substantially curbed weight gain, improved metabolism, and improved the efficacy of insulin in mice by engineering them to express a specific human enzyme in their fat tissue. Although the obesity prevention came at the significant cost of widespread inflammation, the research offers new clues about the connections among obesity, insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes, and inflammation.
"Turning on this molecule has a very dramatic impact on lipid metabolism," said Haiyan Xu, assistant professor ...
Marion's Smart Delights is proud to announce that it won the Gourmet Product Awards. Marion's Gluten-Free Cookie and Muffin Mix won for best baking mix. The versatile, allergy-friendly, and Kosher mix can be used to create everything from fancy party treats to vegan, dairy-free, and even heart-healthy versions of scrumptious muffins, holiday cookies, pies, tarts, and more.
The reduced sugar and low-sodium mix is packed with nutritious whole grains, including quinoa, millet, and amaranth. It is one of a few gluten-free dessert mixes in the market carrying the Whole Grain ...
Washington — Scientists are discovering promising approaches to treating pain, one of the most common and debilitating neurological complaints, according to research released today at Neuroscience 2011, the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience and the world's largest source of emerging news about brain science and health. Studies show that "mirror box therapy" can help reduce arthritis-related pain, and that a new opioid-like drug may be able to relieve acute pain without the euphoric effects that can lead to dependency. Additional research also identifies the ...
Tuberculosis, which kills over 2 million people each year, is caused primarily by infectious bacteria known as Mycobacterium tuberculosis – or Mtb. Mtb targets human immune cells as part of its strategy to avoid detection, effectively neutralizing the body's immune response.
Up until now, scientists had a general understanding of the process, but researchers in the Immunity and Infection Research Centre at Vancouver Coastal Health Research Institute and the University of British Columbia have shown Mtb produces a specific protein that allows it to defuse and bypass ...
Increases in air pollution and other particulate matter in the atmosphere can strongly affect cloud development in ways that reduce precipitation in dry regions or seasons.
This while increasing rain, snowfall and the intensity of severe storms in wet regions or seasons, according to results of a new study.
The research provides the first clear evidence of how aerosols--soot, dust and other particulates in the atmosphere--may affect weather and climate.
The findings have important implications for the availability, management and use of water resources in regions ...
From Enron in the United States to Satyam in India, there are plenty of examples of corporate managers lying about their companies' earnings and ultimately hurting themselves and the businesses they work for.
Why do they do it?
A limited capacity to see the whole picture – known as "bounded rationality" -- combined with a faulty ethical compass are two big reasons, shows a new study from the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management. The study also finds that shareholders are just as guilty of the same weaknesses and that insider trading is linked to earnings ...
CHICAGO (November 14, 2011) – According to the results of a new study published in the November 2011 Journal of the American College of Surgeons, malpractice lawsuits against U.S. surgeons occur often and can take a profound personal toll on the surgeon, resulting in emotional exhaustion, stress, and professional dissatisfaction.
The researchers examined personal and professional characteristics and found malpractice lawsuits were strongly and independently linked to surgeon depression and career burnout. The stress caused by malpractice litigation was rated as equivalent ...
Imagine a cellphone battery that stayed charged for more than a week and recharged in just 15 minutes. That dream battery could be closer to reality thanks to Northwestern University research.
A team of engineers has created an electrode for lithium-ion batteries -- rechargeable batteries such as those found in cellphones and iPods -- that allows the batteries to hold a charge up to 10 times greater than current technology. Batteries with the new electrode also can charge 10 times faster than current batteries.
The researchers combined two chemical engineering approaches ...
Orlando –A new study from researchers at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania and collaborators at various institutions, presented at the 2011 American Heart Association Scientific Sessions, shows that a novel, non-invasive measurement of arterial wave reflections may be able to predict who is most at risk for heart failure. The authors presented data from an ancillary study of the Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis (MESA).
When the heart contracts it generates a pulse or energy wave that travels through the arteries. This wave gets reflected ...
BINGHAMTON, NY -- Online retailers have long wondered if trumpeting consumer-behavior statistics on their websites could hurt business. New findings from Binghamton University should ease their fears, just in time for Cyber Monday.
Qi Wang, an associate professor of marketing at Binghamton University, studied the effects of user comments and sales statistics that accompany products offered on e-commerce sites. While the impact of positive and negative feedback has been well understood, much less was known about so-called "observational behavior" - aka a person's tendency ...
