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Heads Up: Head injuries and Parkinson's
There has been a lot of publicity over the last year about the links between neurodegenerative disease and multiple mild head injuries incurred in many common sports including football and rugby, for example Alan Shearer's BBC documentary on the links between dementia and football. Chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) is a term that has been coined to describe patients who develop behavioural, mood, cognitive and motor disturbances after prolonged exposure to mild head injuries and show abnormal protein folding in the brain.
Alan Shearer, footballer (from the BBC documentary Alan Shearer: Dementia, Football and Me) https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09g0gzk)
This disease process bears similarities to Parkinson's Disease in that normal proteins become misfolded and then aggregate into abnormal deposits which is then associated with brain cell death. We have also known for a long time that previous history of head injuries and concussion increases your risk of Parkinson's. The study below, of almost 700 individuals including a significant number of athletes who had died and agreed to have an autopsy looks in more detail at the links between these conditions.
Overall, they found that people who had repeated head injury during life were much more likely to have the abnormal protein found in Parkinson's, alpha-synuclein, as well as the tau protein, which has been described in CTE. More exposure to head injury - for example greater than 8 years of playing contact sport increased the likelihood of Parkinson's-type pathology. They go on to look at the relationships between the different forms of protein and show that the distribution of the Parkinson's protein alpha-synculein is similar whether or not there was evidence of CTE and likely accounts for the movement problems seen in CTE.
Descriptions of protein-related brain diseases are ever expanding and I believe will guide us in understand the causes of Parkinson's and how the disease progresses. By studying the processes by which mild head injury leads to protein misfolding and how the different proteins interact we are gaining new mechanistic insights which we hope will lead to promising new treatments. From a prevention point of view, the neurological dangers of repetitive mild head injury are increasingly clear - while the authors here showed that playing more than 8 years of playing sport was significantly associated with more pathology, we still need more data before we can develop clear recommendations for both our patients and the wider public.
-Anna
https://academic.oup.com/jnen/advance-article/doi/10.1093/jnen/nly065/5059623
Alan Shearer, footballer (from the BBC documentary Alan Shearer: Dementia, Football and Me) https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09g0gzk)
This disease process bears similarities to Parkinson's Disease in that normal proteins become misfolded and then aggregate into abnormal deposits which is then associated with brain cell death. We have also known for a long time that previous history of head injuries and concussion increases your risk of Parkinson's. The study below, of almost 700 individuals including a significant number of athletes who had died and agreed to have an autopsy looks in more detail at the links between these conditions.
Overall, they found that people who had repeated head injury during life were much more likely to have the abnormal protein found in Parkinson's, alpha-synuclein, as well as the tau protein, which has been described in CTE. More exposure to head injury - for example greater than 8 years of playing contact sport increased the likelihood of Parkinson's-type pathology. They go on to look at the relationships between the different forms of protein and show that the distribution of the Parkinson's protein alpha-synculein is similar whether or not there was evidence of CTE and likely accounts for the movement problems seen in CTE.
Descriptions of protein-related brain diseases are ever expanding and I believe will guide us in understand the causes of Parkinson's and how the disease progresses. By studying the processes by which mild head injury leads to protein misfolding and how the different proteins interact we are gaining new mechanistic insights which we hope will lead to promising new treatments. From a prevention point of view, the neurological dangers of repetitive mild head injury are increasingly clear - while the authors here showed that playing more than 8 years of playing sport was significantly associated with more pathology, we still need more data before we can develop clear recommendations for both our patients and the wider public.
-Anna
https://academic.oup.com/jnen/advance-article/doi/10.1093/jnen/nly065/5059623
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