Racing To Detect Brain Trauma
Scientists search for biomarkers and imaging tools to diagnose concussion-related brain disease while a person is still alive
http://cen.acs.org/articles/92/i29/Racing-Detect-Brain-Trauma.html
To finish off an opponent, Chris (The Canadian Crippler) Benoit sometimes used a move called the diving headbutt.
This involved the professional wrestler scaling the ropes at the edge of the ring and launching himself headfirst toward a downed competitor below.
Once Benoit’s head slammed into the other wrestler someplace—a shoulder perhaps—the match was over, the Crippler victorious.
In 2007, after 22 years in the ring, Benoit murdered his wife and seven-year-old son and then hanged himself. Some in the wrestling community speculated that steroid use was to blame.
Others pointed to a tumultuous relationship between the two-time world champion and his wife. A few conspiracy-minded fans even proposed that Benoit, 40 when he died, had been framed.
But Julian E. Bailes Jr., then the chair of neurosurgery at West Virginia University, had other ideas. He wondered about the effects of all those headbutts. All the concussions. All the chairs to the back of the head.
After the murder-suicide in June 2007, Bailes and colleagues examined slices of Benoit’s brain. The tissue was riddled with aggregates of a protein called tau. Just as Bailes had suspected, the pattern of these tangled fiberlike deposits was consistent with a progressive, brain-damaging condition called chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE).
Scientists search for biomarkers and imaging tools to diagnose concussion-related brain disease while a person is still alive
http://cen.acs.org/articles/92/i29/Racing-Detect-Brain-Trauma.html
To finish off an opponent, Chris (The Canadian Crippler) Benoit sometimes used a move called the diving headbutt.
This involved the professional wrestler scaling the ropes at the edge of the ring and launching himself headfirst toward a downed competitor below.
Once Benoit’s head slammed into the other wrestler someplace—a shoulder perhaps—the match was over, the Crippler victorious.
In 2007, after 22 years in the ring, Benoit murdered his wife and seven-year-old son and then hanged himself. Some in the wrestling community speculated that steroid use was to blame.
Others pointed to a tumultuous relationship between the two-time world champion and his wife. A few conspiracy-minded fans even proposed that Benoit, 40 when he died, had been framed.
But Julian E. Bailes Jr., then the chair of neurosurgery at West Virginia University, had other ideas. He wondered about the effects of all those headbutts. All the concussions. All the chairs to the back of the head.
After the murder-suicide in June 2007, Bailes and colleagues examined slices of Benoit’s brain. The tissue was riddled with aggregates of a protein called tau. Just as Bailes had suspected, the pattern of these tangled fiberlike deposits was consistent with a progressive, brain-damaging condition called chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE).
